The Old Vengeful

Hamilton, he drew up a blue-print for the seizure of the Isle of Wight, Gosport and Portsmouth in that order. All of which were then to be turned into a 'French Gibraltar' thereafter."

"Huh!" snorted Aske.

"Oh ... do not be too contemptuous of the might-have-been, Mr Aske." The Professor shook his head, still good-humoured. "The planning was sound—the troops were available . . . General de Vaux and the Marquis de Rochambeau were to command them . . . and you must remember that your army was then busily engaged in losing the war in America, against General Washington, at the time... It is true that circumstances changed, to render the Franco-Spanish naval squadrons helpless at the crucial time . . . But the plan was sound —the same strategic concept as that the French and the British applied seventy years later, when they set out to take the Crimea and Sebastopol from the Russians, in fact." He smiled. "And all this is a matter of record, in the archives of the English section in the Ministries of Marine and War here in Paris. It is well-known, even."

One of the great might-have-beens, thought Elizabeth.

History was about what happened, and its whole weight endowed the facts after the event with inevitability. But, against all that, there had been so many close-run things—all the useless but tantalising historical cul-de-sacs down which her pupils too often strayed when they were dissatisfied with the facts—" But if Henry of Navarre had not been dummy3

assassinated, Miss Loftus . . ." or " If Mary Tudor had executed Elizabeth—"

Professor Belperron leaned forward suddenly, elbows on his blotter, hands clasped. "What is not well-known—what has never been remarked on until now, except in mere footnotes, because it was overtaken by greater events, and bore no fruit ... is what Colonel Suchet was doing in 1812, my friends."

Now he was not addressing them, but the students of some future class in the ante-room with the table and the chairs: this, translated through what Bertrand Bourienne had said to Paul on the phone, was what must be "interesting" about Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet.

"It comes down, Mr Aske—" the Professor focussed on Humphrey Aske as his main target "—to a question I had never thought to ask myself before, of 1812 . . . Which is: after Russia, what next?"

"The same question Hitler must have asked himself in 1941,"

said Aske, nodding to Elizabeth and Paul in turn.

"Good. Exactly that— good!" From main target Aske was transformed into most promising student. "As with Hitler, so with the Emperor: after the defeat of Russia—the reckoning with England, Mr Aske."

Elizabeth shivered. Suddenly the Professor wasn't a little mannikin swinging his legs under his desk, or even a brave Resistance fighter swinging the same little legs on a landing-dummy3

craft in Portsmouth Harbour in 1944, before D-Day. He was the old hereditary enemy of all those battles, from Hastings in 1066 through Tinchebrai and Bouvines and Agincourt, and Fontenay and Blenheim and Saratoga, and Trafalgar and Salamanca and Waterloo—of all those trumpet-calls and drum-beats which had summoned the two neighbours to waste their genius killing each other in fools' quarrels over the centuries.

"But then it would have been the whole world against England, Mr Aske—the infant United States as well as the whole of Europe—"

"Britain, Professor Belperron," said Paul. "Britain and the Royal Navy, actually."

Belperron nodded. "I give you the Royal Navy, Dr Mitchell—

incomparable, always magnificent . . . but over-stretched by 1812, with the Americans at sea, and a hundred French ships-of-the-line in a dozen European ports, and another hundred on the stocks . . . and the capacity to out-build you from Norfolk in Virginia to Brest and Copenhagen and St Petersburg and Venice . . . the whole world, Mr Aske—not in 1940, or 1914—or 1588 or 1779 . . . but the whole world in 1812—"

"If the Tsar Alexander had given in, Professor," said Aske.

"But he didn't, did he?"

"But he should have done, Mr Aske. After the Emperor reached Moscow—which Hitler never reached . . . And if the Tsar had made terms then . . . what next, Mr Aske?" The dummy3

Professor shook his head. "There was no Churchill in 1812—

there were only nonentities—Mr Spencer Percival had been assassinated by a madman, but he was nobody in any case . . . and Lord Liverpool, his successor—he was nobody also . . . and the Duke of Wellington in Spain, with his little army—after Russia, Mr Aske, the Emperor could have ordered half-a-million soldiers to Spain. And where would Wellington have been then?" The if of 1812 was beginning to assume terrifying proportions in Professor Belperron's imagination, and he spread his hands as though to embrace it. " Make peace, Wellington would have said—because he was a realist. But that might not have been good enough for the Emperor, because he was a realist too, and he knew how England was not to be trusted—England and Europe—

England and Austria, and Prussia, and Austria, none of them were to be trusted . . . But England most of all—so England must be dealt with finally, as the trouble-maker and the paymaster among all the others." The Professor nodded first at Aske, and then at Mitchell, and even at Elizabeth. "She must be taught a lesson—that is what I now think he decided.

A—the word escapes me—but a lesson she would not forget, anyway."

"A salutary lesson—'salutory'?" Aske smiled. "So he dusted off de la Rousselière's 1779 Plan for Portsmouth—was that the salutary lesson?" He glanced sidelong at Paul. "And, of course, our dear Colonel Suchet himself had a nodding acquaintance with Portsmouth, didn't he! Mud-banks and dummy3

hulks, and all that . . . plus a well-founded dislike for the English, as a result—he'd be the ideal man to put his heart and soul into the project, obviously—" he came back to the Professor "—obviously?"

Paul frowned. "What evidence have you for this?" He ignored Aske. "Apart from circumstantial evidence?"

Belperron nodded. "He withdrew all the Hamilton maps and the Rousselière plans from the archives of the Ministry of Marine in the autumn of 1811, to the Ministry of War, where he had a small staff of officers working under him. It is my belief that these officers—and there were engineers and naval experts among them—that they were bringing the Portsmouth Plan up to date on the basis of fresh intelligence from England." He nodded again. "Also ... he solicited reports from Admiral Missiessy on the condition of the squadrons in the Channel and Atlantic ports, and on the construction programme—and from Count Emeriau and Admiral Cosmao on the numbers of trained seamen in Toulon and Genoa, who could be transferred north, to bring the crews of those ships up to strength."

"But. . . except perhaps for those maps ... all this is still circumstantial," said Paul. "Is there any real proof that there was a new Portsmouth Plan, Professor?"

"Circumstantial... up to a point, Dr Mitchell. It is even true that the plans prepared by Hamilton and de la Rousselière were not the only ones Colonel Suchet called for—indeed, all this I already knew, from other researches, though I must dummy3

confess that I never assembled it in this fashion until now . . .

for none of it came to fruition. Because in December—

December 1812—all the maps and plans and charts were returned to the Ministry of Marine, inevitably."

"Why inevitably?" asked Elizabeth.

"The Russian disaster, Mademoiselle. For after that Colonel Suchet was no longer working to strengthen the fleet—he was stripping it of men for the army, in preparation for the European campaigns of 1813. The Portsmouth Plan perished in the snows of Moscow."

"If there ever was a new Portsmouth Plan, Professor." The retreat of the Grande Armée encouraged Aske to advance again.

But Professor Belperron smiled. "Oh, there was a new Portsmouth Plan, I believe that now, even though I have not had time to prove it yet. Not conclusively . . ."

He had something else, thought Elizabeth. He had had it all along, and he had just been waiting for the right moment to let it out of the bag, to impress them.

Paul caught her eye, and grinned—Paul had come to the same conclusion, and that grin told her that he was quite prepared to be impressed if that gave him what he wanted.

He even kept the grin in place for the Professor. "You know ... I don't think you've been quite straight with us, Professor," he said.

The little man, who had been concentrating on Aske, now dummy3

frowned slightly at Paul. "Pardon, Dr Mitchell?"

"What we want to know is why Colonel Suchet was so keen to get our fellows from the Vengeful back into the cooler—

which should also give us the answer why they were treated the way they were, and shunted off to the Lautenbourg, instead of to Verdun, or somewhere like that, where there were other prisoners." Paul leaned forward again. "Well, my old friend Bertrand Bourienne told me that you know more than any man alive about what was happening in France in Napoleon's time, and particularly the last five years of the First Empire—he said, if you didn't know, then no one knew, by God!"

For a moment Elizabeth was afraid that he was laying it on a bit too thick, but then she saw that the Professor was visibly disarmed by such confidence.

"Dr Mitchell... I fear your friend overrates me—"

"I don't think so. I think you know exactly what Suchet was after . . . Or, you've got a pretty damn good idea of it."

Aske sniffed. "Well, it's pretty damn obvious, I should have thought: somehow the poor devils had tumbled to this new Portsmouth Plan of his—it can hardly be anything else, can it?"

Belperron's eyes glinted behind his spectacles. "Can't it, Mr Aske? Can't it?"

Aske opened his mouth, and then thought better of what he had been about to say, and said nothing at all.

dummy3

Belperron shook his head. "To tell the truth, my friends, I do not know exactly what Suchet wished to suppress—I have had far too little time . . . only a matter of hours ... to look for the necessary confirmation of what I believe . . . All I have at this moment is another name—another name connected with Colonel Suchet—and the known facts about him ... a most interesting man . . ."

"What man—what name, Professor?" asked Paul, dutifully on cue.

"James Burns—no, I am sure you will never have heard of him, Mr Aske. James Burns, merchant—import-export, as we would say now . . . James Burns, of London, New York . . .

and Portsmouth, Mr Aske."

"Another traitor?" Aske's mouth twisted. "Or another renegade patriot?"

"No, none of those." The little man shook his head. "This time

— another spy, Mr Aske. Even perhaps a super-spy, since you British never caught him—never even suspected him, so far as I am aware . . . though I know nothing of his subsequent history as yet."

Whatever happened to Father's book on the twelve Vengefuls, there was a book here—or at least a learned article in the Annales historiques de l'Empire in the making, thought Elizabeth. It was surprising that Belperron was prepared to let so much slip.

"How was he not a traitor—or a renegade, Professor?" she dummy3

asked.

"Because he was not an Englishman at all, Mademoiselle,"

said Belperron simply. "He was an American—an Irish American."

"But also a French spy—a spy for France?"

"Ah . . . now there again we are on those debatable frontiers!

Where should a good American—and an Irishman ... an Irishman in any age . . . where should such a man be when England is at war? And in those days, after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, in which my country assisted so inadequately and disastrously?"

"In Portsmouth, apparently," said Paul dryly. "And we let him import-export from there, did we?"

Belperron shook his head. "In England I am not sure that he was James Burns— American . . . not from the way he continued to move at will between the two countries after the Americans had declared war on you. What he did in England, except that he traded in naval stores . . . American timber and cordage, and the like . . . that I do not know. But here in France it was in military equipment—in British greatcoats and boots for the French Army—"

"In what?" Paul's voice cracked.

"British greatcoats and boots—the Grande Armée wore them both into Russia . . . imported through Hamburg, of course."

The Professor smiled his little coldly-amused smile again.

"You must understand how the Industrial Revolution and the dummy3

French Revolution came to terms with each other, Dr Mitchell, and how honest neutrals were caught between them

—it was not a business as conducted in later war. Because in those pragmatic days an honest trader could also obtain licences to break the rules, to the advantage of all parties."

"And James Burns was good at getting licences?"

"That is what I think, Dr Mitchell. As yet I am not sure."

"But you're sure he was a spy?"

"James Burns was a client of Joseph Fouché's Ministry in 1805, and again in 1808—and a close colleague of Colonel Suchet in 1812—that I know, Mr Aske." Professor Belperron brought his hands together. "James Burns had a dream . . . of confusion to Albion . . . that is what I believe."

"With the Portsmouth Plan?"

"With his Portsmouth Plan. Which was very different from those of de la Rousselière and Hamilton—very different, and much more outrageous . . . but perhaps also much more dangerous to England." The little man switched from Aske to Paul. "And which Suchet, of all men, would have recognised, where Fouché would have discounted it." He shrugged.

"Though, to be fair, the time was not ripe in Fouché's day, as it was in Suchet's."

This time they both waited, now that he was altogether wrapped in his own cleverness.

"Some of this I know . . . and some of it I am guessing, on the basis of what I was told last night, which has made me put dummy3

facts together with guesses ... to make an instant theory, you understand? No more than that."

They nodded, and Elizabeth nodded too, to encourage him.

"Good . . . Now it may be that your escaped prisoners somehow knew of de la Rousselière's plans, Mr Aske—Dr Mitchell. I do not know how . . . but it does not matter.

Because, if his plans were good in 1779, they were bad in 1812

—they were plans which would not have attracted Colonel Suchet, I suspect. And also because he would have had in mind the invasion plans of 1804-5—the massing of a great army on the Channel coast to conquer England, not merely to raid it, or capture a foothold."

Aske snuffled. "He would probably have had the Royal Navy in mind also, Professor. And the battle of Trafalgar."

"Very correct, Mr Aske. Always the Royal Navy . . . But by then the Royal Navy without Nelson. And the Royal Navy was stretched all the way to the war with America, with the best part of the British Army fighting in Spain, and the rest of it in Canada, fighting the Americans . . . And 1813 would not have been 1805 in Europe either, Mr Aske: Suchet was planning for an invasion in which the Emperor no longer had to worry about the armies of Austria and Prussia and Russia, as he had had to do in 1805. This would have been his last battle, you must remember, Mr Aske—his very last battle!"

That silenced Aske, as Elizabeth herself could hear the echo of his own words from yesterday: In 1812 we were losing the war . . . And that had been before this image of a defeated dummy3

Russia, with no catastrophic retreat from Moscow.

"But you are right to remind us of your navy, Mr Aske—it was your navy which frightened the German generals in 1940, before the Battle of Britain, not the RAF . . . And the very idea of seizing a defended port, like Portsmouth, in a coup de main, with its warships there at anchor— ridiculous!"

Belperron waved a hand dismissively. " I remember the Canadians coming back from Dieppe in 1942, what there was left of them . . . That made it certain we would not try to seize a port in 1944, but would invade across the open beaches—as the Emperor planned to do in 1805, up the coast from Portsmouth, where you built your equally ridiculous Martello Towers in those days—along the same beaches where William the Norman landed in 1066 . . . No, Mr Aske, the pattern of prudent invaders down the centuries has always been the same: get as much of your army ashore first on some likely beach—then seek battle with your enemy's army and invest his strong places. But do not make your assault on those strong places from the sea in the first place— that is the lesson of history." He sat back confidently.

"So what was James Burns's 'Portsmouth Plan', then?" asked Paul. "Because Portsmouth would have been a strong enough place. Apart from whatever garrison there would have been, there'd be the navy itself—the ships at anchor. You'd never have got a ship into Portsmouth harbour, Professor, let alone a man ashore."

"You are right," agreed the Professor, "but, you see, there was dummy3

no need to get a ship into the harbour, Dr Mitchell, and no need to put a man ashore. Not when they were already there." He paused momentarily. "The hulks, Mr Aske—have you forgotten the hulks?"

"Christ!" exclaimed Aske. " The hulks!"

"The hulks?" Paul turned to him.

"The prison ships. There was a whole line of them right there in the harbour—jammed with French prisoners!"

"Fourteen ships, to be exact, Mr Aske," said the Professor pedantically. "Your old prizes of war from France, like the Prothée, from which Colonel Suchet escaped, and from the Spanish and Danish fleets . . . and your own old worn-out battleships—fourteen ships containing over nine thousand men . . . Wretched prisoners—embittered prisoners—all the men who had escaped and been re-captured, officers among them . . . desperate men, Mr Aske—Dr Mitchell . . . and also trained soldiers and sailors, with trained leaders among them."

"And right there in the harbour," Aske repeated. "Christ!"

"And on shore too—right there in the harbour," said the Professor softly. "Behind the old Roman walls of Portchester Castle . . . another seven thousand men. And just across the water, in the prison at Gosport . . . thousands more. Over twenty thousand men in all."

For a moment neither Paul nor Aske spoke, then Paul drew a deep breath. "Evidence, Professor?"

dummy3

"For 1812—little as yet, Dr Mitchell." The Professor shook his head. "As yet I have not had time, and I am guessing . . . But for James Burns' earlier plans there is evidence—plans which were discounted at the time, in spite of all his powers of persuasion." He paused. "He argued that the troops guarding the prisoners were of the poorest quality—the sweepings of the British army and navy, officered by pensioners and rejects . . . He argued that both the hulks and the land prisons were organised to keep unarmed men from breaking out—not to prevent a handful of armed and determined men breaking in . . . To be precise, he asked for two hundred men, two hundred British uniforms, and a thousand muskets.

After that he said he would capture what he needed, and burn what he did not want. And with that he could take Portsea Island, occupying the fortified lines across the isthmus, and would hold it until relieved by the invading armies."

Aske looked at Paul. "It would have been a bloody massacre

— either way."

The Professor shrugged. "It would have been chaos and confusion, and death and destruction, of that there can be no doubt." He wagged a finger at them both. "But it would have appealed to Colonel Suchet, of all men—that is important.

Because he knew the hulks, and he knew Portsmouth. And even if he did not plan to land the invasion army at Portsmouth, he would appreciate the value of such a terrifying diversion—I am sure of that."

dummy3

Paul rubbed his chin, looking first at Elizabeth, then at Aske.

"I think we have to go away and think about this one."

Aske frowned. "What d'you mean, think about it?"

"Well, for a start . . . going to Alsace can serve no useful purpose, not now." Paul thought for a moment. "We have to begin again with the Vengeful—how the devil can Chipperfield have got wind of any of this?"

"Perhaps he didn't," said Elizabeth. "Perhaps Colonel Suchet was just trying to make sure . . . ?"

"Perhaps we ought to have another look at the Fortuné?" said Aske tentatively. "We could do that over here, with Professor Belperron's help, maybe?"

"Professor Wilder could tell us about Portsmouth," said Elizabeth. "He's a tremendous expert on everything to do with its history—even Father admitted that."

Paul nodded. "Wilder's a good bet, Elizabeth." He looked towards the little Frenchman. "If you could keep digging at this end, sir ... if you could spare the time, that is?"

Belperron had been watching them curiously, his eyes darting from one to the other. "Well . . . if that is all that you want . . . there will surely be other documents, it is only a matter of knowing where to look, and what to look for, and how to look at it—" He stopped abruptly as Paul stood up.

"Of course. Isn't it always?" Paul started to shrug, then turned the shrug into a little bow. "And you have pointed us in a promising direction, Professor. We are indebted to dummy3

you . . . But we mustn't take any more of your time."

"Yes." Aske stood up in turn, taking his cue from Paul.

"Elizabeth," commanded Paul.

"Yes." She stood up obediently, but she was conscious that something had happened which she had missed, only she had no idea what it was.

Belperron stood up behind his desk, unnaturally tall. For a moment he seemed undecided as to what to say. Then he returned the bow. "I will be interested to hear from you, Dr Mitchell. We must keep in touch," he said stiffly.

"Absolutely right—we must keep in touch!" Paul's enthusiasm was as false as the Professor's height. "Please don't bother—we'll see our way out—"

Aske was already opening the door. Elizabeth found herself sidling through it almost crab-wise.

"Most grateful, Professor—" she heard Paul say as she collided with one of the chairs in the second ante-room.

Paul closed the door behind him. "Is there a back-entrance, Aske?"

"Christ! I don't know!" said Aske.

"What's happening?" said Elizabeth.

Paul went to the window. "There's something not right about this."

Aske nodded. "I agree. Definitely not right."

"I don't understand—" Elizabeth heard her own voice crack.

dummy3

"What—?"

"Can you see anything?" said Aske. And then, when Paul merely shook his head, he turned to Elizabeth. "He didn't ask enough questions—he gave us too much, much too easily—he was scared, if you ask me—" he switched to Paul "—right?"

"And he's not the only one, by God!" murmured Paul, still craning his neck at the window.

"Scared?" Whatever they'd seen, she hadn't caught the slightest glimpse of it. But now she was joining the club to which they both belonged.

"There has to be a back-entrance," said Aske decisively.

"Let's get out while we can, Mitchell . . . I'll go first—that's what I'm bloody-well paid for—"

He took two steps towards the door, but it opened before he could grasp the handle, and he skipped back as though it had tried to sting him.

Elizabeth was simultaneously aware of Aske jumping back, and Paul turning from the window towards the open door, and of her own frozen immobility.

And of what was in the doorway.

"Nikki!" exclaimed Paul. "What a delightful surprise!"

XIII

EMERALD GREEN—emerald green was by any reckoning a dangerous colour for a woman to attempt.

dummy3

But this woman could get away with it, with her pale complexion and the flaming red hair—except that it wasn't red, thought Elizabeth enviously, but that painter's colour which stopped the man who'd been talking to you in mid-sentence and made him lose the thread of what he was saying.

" Nikki!" The second time Paul managed to substitute pleasure for surprise. "How delightful!"

The woman in the doorway gave him a cold smile.

"Captain . . . Mitchell, is it?" The eyes took in Aske, and dismissed him; and then took in Elizabeth, and lingered on her for just half a second longer— the eyes were green too, damn it!—and then dropped her, coming back to Paul. "It's been a long time, Captain—six years?"

"Seven, more like—since Hameau Ridge, Nikki—far too long!" He wasn't pretending his regret: even the best liar couldn't electrify his lie so well. "We should have contrived a Hameau Ridge Old Comrades' Reunion ages ago."

Mid-thirties, decided Elizabeth critically. But still almost flawless, and seven years ago didn't bear thinking about.

"But what brings you here?" This time there was a slight loss of conviction in Paul's voice.

"You do—as you well know."

" I do?" He frowned. "But why? What am I supposed to have done now?" The frown deepened. "You're not going to tell me that this is . . . official?"

dummy3

"Official—what?" said Aske. "What's going on?"

"What indeed!" Paul gestured helplessly. "I'm sorry, Humphrey—and Elizabeth . . . but this, apparently, is Mademoiselle Nicole MacMahon, of the French security service—which bit of it I'm not quite sure." His voice tightened as he spoke. "But if this is official business then I don't need to introduce my friends to you, Nikki, because you'll already know who they are . . . Only, as for what's going on—I'd like to know that, too."

Mademoiselle MacMahon looked at each of them in turn again. "Captain Mitchell—"

"No. Not 'captain'. That was strictly acting and temporary—

and unpaid, as it happens. If you want to be formal, Nikki, it's 'Doctor Mitchell' now—PhD, Cantab." He shook his head suddenly, as though to dispel unreality. "Only I just don't see why it has to be formal."

She looked at him, almost sadly so it seemed to Elizabeth.

"Very well—Paul."

"That's better!"

"It isn't better. I had hoped you would not be tiresome, Paul.

That is why they sent me—because we know each other, and you wouldn't try to play the innocent."

"I'm not going to be tiresome, Nikki. But this is one time when I can't avoid being innocent. Because that's what I am—

what we all are."

Nikki MacMahon sighed, and then indicated the table. "Sit dummy3

down, please."

They sat down facing her, examinees again.

"So you are innocent, Paul. Which means that you are not in France in a professional capacity, concerned with any matter of security?"

"No, I didn't say that." Paul's face was expressionless. "I am in France professionally. And I am concerned with a security matter."

"What?" The delicately-pencilled eyebrows rose.

"A matter of the greatest importance to my country, in fact...

in 1812, that is."

Nikki MacMahon's lips compressed into a tight line.

"In 1812, Nikki . . . if what Professor Belperron back there says is even half right—" Paul jerked his thumb over his shoulder "—your little Corsican Tyrant was planning to do our dear old Farmer George a terrible mischief. That's the security matter we're interested in— and I'm interested in it as a professional historian. And that's the beginning and the end of it—ask anybody—ask Miss Loftus here . . . It's her father's book I'm commissioned to finish, you see."

"I know about the book, Paul." Nikki MacMahon had recovered from that brief moment of irritation when she'd been outmanoeuvred. "I know about your escaped sailors at Coucy—I know about Colonel Suchet—I know about all that."

"Well, then—" Paul spread his hands "—if you know about all that, then what the hell are you doing here?" Then he dummy3

frowned again. "You must have talked to my friend Bertrand Bourienne? Yes . . . well, I hope you didn't frighten the life out of him, that's all! But if you talked to him . . . and I suppose you were listening in the back there to what was said in Professor Belperron's study—of course you were!" He shook his head at her. "I thought there was something funny about that—it just never occurred to me what it was . . . But—

okay—I hope you enjoyed what you heard! So ask poor old Bertrand, and ask Professpr Belperron anything you like too.

But I'm afraid they'll only be able to tell you the truth, plain and simple, Nikki."

Whatever the truth was, it wasn't plain and simple, thought Elizabeth. And yet it was also the truth, that was the twisted strand of irony in Paul's display of injured innocence—the truth which he himself could make no sense of.

"I see." Nikki MacMahon's smile was halfway into a sneer.

"So it is merely the year 1812 in which you are interested?"

"1812, yes. And maybe 1813 and 1811. And I could throw in 1805 and 1779 now, I suppose." Paul shrugged, then turned to Elizabeth. "We shall have to replace that whole chapter, of course. But we've got something much better already. And if I can argue Nikki here into clapping us in jail for a few days I shouldn't wonder but that we might have a best-seller, Elizabeth." He came back to the Frenchwoman almost lazily.

"The Press would like that—on both sides of the Channel, Nikki . . . how you caught your wicked English spies 170

years too late—they'd really enjoy that." Then he shrugged dummy3

again. "Of course, it won't exactly polish up the image of the Direction de la Securité du Territoire . . . But you can't win

'em all." He looked at his watch ostentatiously. "So shall we just be on our way, then? It's lunch-time, and I'm more than ready for Humphrey's favourite restaurant."

The green eyes blazed for a fraction of a second, then became ice-cold again, and Elizabeth warmed herself in the chill of their coldness. Whatever had happened those seven years ago, there was more rivalry between them than affection, and no rivalry for her to fight.

"No," said Nikki MacMahon.

No, thought Elizabeth: this formidable woman would never let any mere man walk away from her unbruised, not if she could help it, and least of all an English man.

The woman turned suddenly to Aske.

"Mr Aske—if Dr Mitchell is a professional historian . . . tell me what you do for a living?"

Paul stiffened. "Oh—come on, Nikki! You know who we both work for, one way or another—you said that's why they gave you this job ... So Humphrey works with me, you know that.

But what you probably don't know is that he's an authority on early nineteenth-century naval history—is that the answer you want?"

"I want Mr Aske's answer, Paul. Mr Aske—?"

Aske sat back. "I wouldn't dream of being uncivil, Miss MacMahon . . . but if you were a man I'd say it really wasn't dummy3

any of your damn business—beyond what's on my passport, anyway." He smiled at her. "Which says 'Civil Servant', as it happens."

Nikki MacMahon switched abruptly back to Paul. "Where did you go yesterday afternoon?"

"After we landed?" Paul packed insolence into his pause for innocent reflection. " Ah . . . did you lose us for an hour or two? Well . . . let's see ... we signed in at our hotel in Laon, and dropped off our bags . . . Then we went for a spin in the country before meeting Bertrand . . . Then we went back to Laon, and had a drink, and had our dinner— the profiterolés were delicious—and had another drink . . . and then we went to bed. Do you want more detail than that? Did you dream of anything subversive to the Republic, Humphrey?"

Another flash of green fire. "Where did you go before you met M'sieur Bourienne?"

"We took Elizabeth to see the Chemin des Dames, where the French Army mutinied in 1917. I wanted to show her the British War Cemetery at Vendresse, Nikki—you know my weakness for visiting British war cemeteries in France. I remember taking you to the Prussian Redoubt Cemetery on the edge of Hameau Ridge, back in '74—you remarked on the way the poppies grew there, as I recall. . . They don't grow nearly so well in Champagne as on the Somme—do they, Elizabeth?"

He was cruel, thought Elizabeth. But then, he was fighting on another disadvantageous slope, against heavy odds, so there dummy3

was no room for weakness in his tactics.

"Yes—that's what we did." She nodded at Nikki. "I signed the book there, Ma'mselle—" she wanted to add It's a lovely sad place, but that would have been an insult to those poor dead Tommies, to add the truth of what she had felt.

The green eyes pinned her momentarily. "Yes, I'm sure you did, Miss Loftus."

Hating herself, Elizabeth frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

Nikki turned from her. "Your cover was always good, Paul.

You haven't changed."

"Cover?" Something stopped him from denying the charge. "I seem to remember your cover back in ' 74 was pretty damn good, if you want to talk about covers, Nikki."

Nobody was deceiving anybody, thought Elizabeth. Yet they were both bound by the rules of a game which she didn't really understand, even though she was now one of the players.

"Mr Aske—" Nikki came round to Humphrey Aske again, as though still searching for a weakness in their defences, but now with a hint of weariness in her voice "—why were you nosing around so long outside, after you'd parked your car?

Why didn't you come straight here?'

Aske shrugged unrepentantly. "Just habit, I suppose. I always take a professional interest in stake-outs, even when they're as amateurish as yours, Miss MacMahon ... I thought the local police must be up to something—I never imagined dummy3

your people could be so gauche—we'd never set up anything so crude in London ... I was looking to see who it was for—it never occurred to me that it was for us, Miss MacMahon!"

When it came to insults, Aske had nothing to learn from Paul, Elizabeth was reminded. They were both professionals.

"No?" The Frenchwoman countered him with bored disbelief. "Just habit. . . and you are such a good driver, aren't you?"

"A good driver?" Aske feigned bewilderment. "Yes. I've done a bit of rallying in my time, and I've been round the circuit at Brand's Hatch. . . Let's say I'm a good driver—possibly a very good one, if it's of the slightest interest to you."

"Not a great deal. But losing those cars which were following you—that was just habit too, Mr Aske?"

"Good lord! You even had a tail on us?" Aske's tone was mocking. "That was a bit antediluvian, surely? I mean . . .

doesn't your budget run to directional devices?" He thought for a moment, and then shook his head as though mildly surprised. "It wasn't even awfully bright, either . . . if you already knew where we were going . . . ?"

"You didn't lose them, then? On the périphérique?"

"Was that where I lost them?" He indicated mild interest, edged with amusement. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in Paris I do like to drive like a Frenchman—it's a little conceit of mine ... I'd say it looks rather as though your drivers are like your stake-out: just not up to the job."

dummy3

"Not my drivers, Mr Aske." The perfectly painted lips again compressed momentarily—lips already a tiny bit too thin for perfection, Elizabeth noted: add a few years, and that would be an unforgiving mouth.

But then the face round the mouth turned towards her, and it was her turn for the next broadside.

For what we are about to receive—that was the way they waited for it in the old navy—

" Nikki. . ." Paul cut into the instant of silence before the crash of the coup-de-grace ". . . I've taken about as much of this nonsense as old acquaintance allows, for Hameau Ridge's sake. But now I'm getting close to pulling rank on you."

"Rank?" The challenge turned her back to him. "What rank, Paul?"

"Try me and find out." Paul regarded her obstinately. "If you're not going to tell us what's happening then arrest us or let us go. But no more questions."

But this wouldn't do, decided Elizabeth: he had picked up her silent distress signal, but was hazarding his own safety in order to save her. And she wasn't going to be humiliated like that by either of them.

"It's all right, Paul." Her confidence flooded back with the sound of her own voice: if Elizabeth Loftus could viva voce First Class Honours from the borderline against two hostile examiners, what could this French bitch do that could dummy3

frighten her? "If Mademoiselle MacMahon wants to ask me anything, she's welcome. I don't have anything to hide."

The green eyes came back to her, uncompromising but also at least no longer so dismissive. And that in itself pumped more adrenalin: it was better to be scared than to be nothing, she discovered to her surprise.

And get in first signalled the adrenalin—

"After all, it's my fault that Dr Mitchell and Mr Aske are here, Mademoiselle." It was no different from sighting the enemy's quarter-deck in the v-notch of the carronade, and then pulling the lanyard.

"My father commanded Vengeful, and I asked Dr Mitchell to finish his book."

It pleased her to drop the the from Vengeful, as Father always insisted, and she was the more rewarded by the very slightest suggestion of doubt in those green eyes.

"I wasn't going to ask you any questions, Miss Loftus, as a matter of fact... I thought it just possible that you might not know what was happening to you." The doubt faded. "But now I think I may have been wrong."

Bluff. Or, if not bluff, what could they do to her?

"Wrong about what, Mademoiselle?"

Aske sat up suddenly, as though stung. " Not your drivers, Miss MacMahon? Not your drivers?" He looked quickly at Paul, then back at the Frenchwoman. "Whose drivers, then?"

"Good question, Humphrey!" said Paul. "Whose drivers, if dummy3

not theirs? And the right question too, because it gives us our answer in one."

"Answer to what?"

"All this. The VIP treatment!" Paul nodded. "Mademoiselle MacMahon's newest masters don't give a stuff for the British, but they don't want any unscheduled trouble with their Russian friends at the moment, not with all the deals they've got going."

"With the Russians?" Aske repeated the words incredulously.

"What the devil have the Russians got to do with what we've been doing?"

"I can't imagine. But if I had to guess ... I'd say that we're all the victims of ... a misunderstanding, shall we say?" Paul looked at Nikki MacMahon hopefully. "How about that?"

"A misunderstanding?" She received his olive branch as though it had nettles entwined in it.

"That's right. Because . . . contrary to what you have assumed . . . Humphrey and I are on leave, and we're strictly devoted to 1812. And if you can prove anything else, you can lock us both up and throw away the key—and we'll come quietly, too."

"But I don't have to prove anything—"

Paul lifted his hand. "I haven't finished. You have a nasty suspicious mind, Nikki—or your bosses have . . . But if the roads behind us are crawling with KGB heavies I can't honestly blame you altogether."

dummy3

"That's very generous of you, Paul." She seemed to relent slightly. "You're about to blame them, are you—for also having nastier and more suspicious minds?"

"Ah . . . now you're beginning to get my drift." He smiled.

"But I don't altogether blame either of you, actually . . .

Because, you see, Nikki, before I started my leave I was engaged in an activity which surely interested them . . .

Nothing that had anything whatsoever to do with France, I assure you . . . but something they certainly could take exception to. Only, you appreciate that I can't tell you what."

He shrugged disarmingly. "But I suppose it is just possible they thought I was still hard at work—quite incorrectly, as it happens."

Elizabeth became aware that her mouth had dropped open, and closed it quickly. It wasn't so much that he was craftily offering the French security service Peace With Honour, as that he had so quickly and ingeniously interwoven truth with lies, and fact with fiction.

The emerald-green shoulders drooped. "Paul... do you know how many cars they sent to Laon?"

It was in the balance now, as he shook his head.

"Five, Paul. And ten men. Ten men, Paul!"

It was still in the balance.

"We were afraid there was going to be a blood-bath." Nikki stared at him. "And you're lying—of course."

It was going the wrong way.

dummy3

Paul gave a tiny shrug. "Well, if I told you the truth you'd never believe it. Just let Elizabeth go, that's all—she was led astray by bad company, you can say."

"No." Nikki shook her head again. "It's all or none."

"Better make it all then, because I promise we'll go quietly.

But if we have to stay we'll make trouble, I promise you that, too." He nodded. "Starting with a phone call to the British Embassy."

"You can have one call, Paul." This time Nikki nodded. "From the departure lounge. Your plane leaves in two hours. The seats are already booked."

XIV

As ELIZABETH REACHED for the bell-chain which hung beside the big iron-bound door a narrow window under the eaves above swung open.

"Oh—hullo there! I thought I heard a car." Cathy Audley's little bespectacled face peered out of the window. "You're early . . . but come on in—it isn't locked."

Elizabeth set her hand on the latch, and then remembered Humphrey Aske and turned back towards the car.

"The daughter, is that?" He made a face. "You go on, Miss Loftus, and I'll bring in your luggage . . . And then you'll have to protect me. I'm not at my best with little girls."

He wouldn't be, thought Elizabeth waspishly, and then dummy3

despised herself for becoming infected with Paul's prejudices.

The trouble was, it was not an infection which could be shrugged off easily once it was in the blood, even though Aske of all men had treated her with his own brand of courtesy, diffident but unfailing; it wasn't anything he said, or anything he did—it was what he was which made her irrationally uneasy, and there was nothing to be done about it.

She forced her mind away from him, and stepped into the house— and was uneasy there, too: it was like coming home, yet not coming home—home, because here, still guarded, she could feel safe, and she who outlives this day and comes safe home . . . and because the home from which she had been plucked on Saturday could never be home again for her after what had happened in it.

"Elizabeth!" Cathy pattered down the great polished staircase and skidded breathlessly to a halt in front of her. "You're early—sorry, but Mummy's gone to Guildford with Daddy—

but the old gentleman's here, and I've put him in the library with Mummy's Guardian and a glass of sherry."

What old gentleman? There was simultaneously too much and too little to grasp there at one go: they were expected, which was fair enough from Paul's phone call, which had brought two cars to Gatwick . . . and Humphrey Aske had driven one of those with all his Brand's Hatch skill . . . But what old gentleman?

dummy3

"That's fine, dear—" Gently now, gently, to be taken for granted by a child as an equal was a high compliment, not to be trifled with "—how long has he been here?"

"Oh not long. Do you know, Elizabeth—he has hair coming out of his ears?" Cathy nodded. "But he's terrifically polite—

he calls me 'Miss Audley' and stands up when I come into the library, would you believe it?"

Elizabeth had hoped for better than that, but while she was searching for another approach the door clicked behind her and Cathy's magnified eyes looked past her.

"Hullo. Who are you?" The child frowned.

"I... am Eeyore's brother," said Humphrey Aske. "Do you know who Eeyore was?"

"Yes." The eyes filled with suspicion. "He was a donkey."

"Correct. So people put burdens on me. And they beat me at regular intervals. And that makes me a donkey."

And that did indeed make him a donkey, thought Elizabeth, even though he was doing his best with Winnie-the-Pooh.

Because he had chosen the wrong child to patronise.

"Cathy—this is Humphrey Aske, a friend of your father's,"

she said hurriedly. "Mr Aske—Miss Audley." She grinned at Cathy conspiratorially.

" Ee-ore," said Aske self-consciously.

"How do you do, Mr Aske," said Cathy.

"I'm bad-tempered, actually," said Aske. "Nobody's offered dummy3

me a thistle forages."

"A— what?" Cathy regarded him incredulously.

"I haven't had my lunch, little girl," Aske sighed. "And I haven't had my tea, either."

Cathy wilted slightly at little girl.

"You don't happen to have a thistle, by any chance?" inquired Aske, before Elizabeth could intervene.

"Cathy—"

"Would you like a glass of sherry, Mr Aske?" said Cathy icily.

This time it was Aske who wilted.

"It's all right, Cathy," said Elizabeth. "We've just come back from France, you see."

"Or, to be exact, we've been thrown out—on our ears ... or maybe on some other part of our anatomy, eh?" Aske gave Elizabeth a rueful half-grin, ignoring Cathy Audley.

"Oh!" Cathy's ears pricked, and she turned to Elizabeth. "Is that persona non grata? Daddy explained that to me just recently—'grata' agreeing with 'persona', he said." She came back to Aske. "Which means you've been caught red-handed, he said."

Aske's mouth opened wordlessly.

"What did they catch you doing? Or shouldn't I ask?" Cathy over-fed his confusion before turning again to Elizabeth. "Of course—Daddy was going to France, wasn't he! I even gave him some money to buy that smelly after-shave for Uncle dummy3

Jack, for Christmas— Paco—Paco—Paco . . . Paco—did they catch you doing something too, Elizabeth?"

"They didn't catch us doing anything, really," said Elizabeth.

"Ah—now that is strictly true." Aske had recovered his cool.

"But they did catch us doing nothing, and sometimes that's just as bad as being caught doing something."

Cathy nodded seriously. "That's like at school: if they ask you what you're doing, and you say 'nothing' they never believe you, they think you're doing something bad. Poor you!" She nodded again, sympathetically this time, then frowned suddenly. "But where's Paul? I bet they didn't catch him!"

So Paul had made another conquest. But instinctively Elizabeth decided to leave his reputation intact.

"No, they didn't catch him, Cathy." Anyway, there was an element of truth in that: Paul had always been way ahead of them in expecting the worst. "He's gone to London." Besides, there was another and more pressing matter. "Hadn't we better go and meet the old gentleman?"

"Yes—" Cathy's answer was cut off by a sudden bleeping, muted but insistent, which seemed to come from inside her

"— oops! That means Mummy's puddings have to come out of the Aga!" She produced a slim pocket calculator from her smock. "I got this for my birthday—it's jolly useful, because it reminds me of things . . . He's in the library, Elizabeth—just down the end of the passage there. Can you find your way while I take the puddings out of the oven?" She started to dummy3

turn away.

"What old gentleman?" Aske called after her.

"The one that knows all about Elizabeth's ship, Daddy says—

Daddy asked him to come, he says—" Cathy disappeared through a door in what was presumably the puddings'

direction.

Aske looked at Elizabeth. "A disconcertingly precocious child, as well as a typical only child— persona non grata indeed!"

"She's probably learning Latin, that's all," said Elizabeth defensively.

"A typical Audley child, more like. 'Grata' may agree with

'persona', but she doesn't agree with me, Miss Loftus. And who is this old gentleman who knows all about your ship?"

"I don't know—except that he has hair coming out of his ears and is apparently very polite."

"Ah! Now that is a positive identification on both counts, if ever I heard one!" Aske perked up. "Let us go and meet the great Professor Basil Wilson Wilder, Miss Loftus—down the passage, was it?"

Elizabeth followed him into the green-shaded gloom of the passage, the windows of which were half-obscured by the wisteria on the front of the house. There was no help for it, but she felt daunted by the prospect ahead, not so much because two elderly professors in one day were too many, as by the memory of Father's enraged correspondence with this dummy3

same Professor Wilder, both in public and in private, over the Vengeful renaming. The two men had never been friends aftgr an earlier Wilder review of From Trafalgar to Navarino, which had mildly disagreed with Father's assessment of Collingwood. But after the Vengeful letters even the mention of the Professor's name had been taboo.

Aske held the door open for her, courteous as ever.

It really was a library, not merely a room with books in it: it was as totally book-lined as the ante-rooms in Professor Belperron's apartment, except that the book-spines were much more colourful, and the room itself was beautiful, with its oak-beamed ceiling and intricately geometric Persian carpet on an unpolished stone-flagged floor, and a great blaze of flowers in the open fireplace, and—

And there, on a low table in front of the fireplace, was Father's Vengeful box—her Vengeful box—

The old gentleman rose slowly from an immense leather chair, his back to her, refolded his Guardian unhurriedly and placed it on the box, and turned towards her.

"Miss Loftus, I presume?"

Age . . . yet with that indefinable twinkle, not of second childhood, but of victorious longevity, a quality Elizabeth had only observed once before, in a very old lady—a great lady, who had somehow combined age with inextinguishable youth, and had made it beautiful.

"Professor Wilder?" It had never occurred to her that a man dummy3

could achieve that same beauty; but of course it had nothing to do with being a man, any more than it had to do with age—

it was the triumph of mind over both those conditions.

"Mr Aske—we meet again!" The tiniest nuance of. . . it was not distaste, for this man was long past any desire to wound any other creature, whatever his second sight saw hidden in it... it was more like sympathy neutralising the instinctive but unfair emotions which Paul had for Aske, with which he had infected her. "What a pleasure!"

"For me too, Professor." Aske's voice thickened, as though he was unwilling to admit his own feelings sincerely. "But what brings you here—to us—hot-foot?"

"Hot-foot?" Wilder tested the image. "In this age of the motor-car that is almost a contradiction— my feet become cold with inactivity when I am carried urgently from one place to another . . . not like Roger Bannister, with his four-minute mile at Iffley—or Pheidippides carrying the news of Marathon to Athens, eh?" He smiled. "But hot-foot nevertheless—yes!" He transferred the smile to Elizabeth, and then re-edited it to seriousness. "Miss Loftus . . . we have never met until now, but as one of your school governors I have heard of your prowess with our history scholarship girls, and I have admired your results from afar. You have a rare gift, I think—rare, because those who have it tend to gravitate to university teaching . . . But you have not, and I am glad of it."

In that instant all Elizabeth's plans for enjoying her ill-gotten dummy3

gains as a rich woman went out of the window: if this old gentleman thought she must teach, then she must teach.

"I very much regret that circumstances have militated against our meeting until now. But that is in the past—" he twinkled at her "—and now we meet at last!" He became suddenly serious. "I was sorry to hear about your father's death, my dear. Because ... in our time we had our differences, for which I must take my share of the blame, I fear . . . but he was a considerable scholar in his own field."

"Differences" was an understatement, and the lion's share of the blame for them had been Father's, but he was burying the past gently and generously for her benefit.

"In the circumstances, it would not have been appropriate for me to write to you—I do not think you would have wished that. Yet... in these new circumstances, I am glad of the opportunity to be of service to you." He frowned slightly, and cocked his head, and looked into spaccjust above her shoulder. "You know, I have been practising that little speech in preparation for you, and it sounded perfectly admirable inside my head. But now that I've heard it... it does sound not only pompous, but thoroughly insincere." His eyes came back to her. "Perhaps I had better not ask you to give me the benefit of your doubt. So shall I say rather that I find your quest vastly interesting? Will that do?"

Aske advanced from behind her into the corner of her vision.

"But I didn't tell you what the quest was, Professor."

"No . . . you didn't, Mr Aske." Wilder bent down and lifted dummy3

the Guardian off the Vengeful box for a moment. "But your . . . friend, Dr Audley, has rectified that omission." He looked at Elizabeth. "All the relevant papers your father collected are in there, Miss Loftus . . . together with photo-copies of the Irene Cookridge material."

"And what did Audley ask you to do with it?" inquired Aske.

"To study it, Mr Aske, to study it... To let my imagination range freely over it. What else?" Professor Wilder answered inquiry with inquiry. "When you came to ask me about the prisoner-of-war usages of the time, you indicated a certain urgency. David—Dr Audley— re-iterated that urgency. And he gave me a secretary and a young man to do my leg-work, which served to emphasise the urgency. But urgency is no friend to the historian—urgency is for the journalist, it is the necessary spur to his skill, his art . . . For the historian what is required is time and tranquillity, for the slow sifting of the facts, and for the gradual and hesitant advance towards glimpses of truth—that is the historian's art." He smiled at Elizabeth. "There! I'm doing it again! And all you want to know is what I can imagine for you!"

Elizabeth smiled back. "And what can you imagine, Professor?"

He stared at her, and suddenly he was no longer smiling.

"A tragedy, I think, my dear. Or perhaps not altogether a tragedy, because if two men died for this box of your father's, two men were also saved in some sense by it."

dummy3

"For the box?" Aske frowned at the Vengeful box.

"Two men died?" said Elizabeth.

"Lieutenant Chippcrficld and Midshipman Paget." Wilder nodded. "Two good and brave young men. But didn't you know that?"

"I didn't know about the midshipman, Professor. We've only traced them as far as Coucy-le-Château."

"Where?"

"Coucy—" But of course he couldn't know—or Audley hadn't told him about that. "Where Lieutenant Chipperfield died in France, Professor."

"Ah! The great tower? You've been following them in France, I was forgetting! I have been tracking them in England—Tom Chard and the American, Timms."

"That leaves a gap in the middle, between Coucy and here,"

said Aske. "But obviously they crossed it somehow."

"You haven't read Miss Cookridge's papers?" Wilder seemed surprised. Then he gestured towards the box. "But that can be easily rectified."

"Don't bother, Professor—just tell us." Aske looked at Elizabeth. "We're used to having the facts doled out to us one by one. I think they wanted to see how much we could make of them as we went along."

Wilder studied them both for a moment, as though he didn't know quite what to make of that flash of bitterness. "There isn't much to tell, Mr Aske. After Chipperfield died they went dummy3

on towards the Pas de Calais."

"With Paget dressed as a girl?"

"At first. But not for long."

"He didn't like being a girl, I'll bet." Aske nodded.

"He took command, Mr Aske, nevertheless."

"At the age of thirteen?"

"He was a warrant officer and Chipperfield naturally passed on the command to him. ' Mr Chipperfield instructed Mr Paget as to his wishes, and these we did then execute to the best of our power' , that is what Tom Chard said. It was the old navy, Mr Aske: the Lieutenant gave them their orders, and the orders lived on after he was dead."

"So they headed for the Pas de Calais . . ."

"For Dunkirk. That was almost certainly the plan from the start— to steal a boat at Dunkirk."

"Why Dunkirk?"

"Because the Dunkirkers were celebrated for their pro-British sympathies. Only the year before we'd released a couple of dozen of their people—men they particularly wanted—in gratitude for the way they'd treated the survivors from a wrecked Indiaman. And there'd long been an unofficial live-and-let-live understanding between the navy and the local fishermen. Also Napoleon himself notoriously disliked Dunkirkers—and they reckoned he was more their enemy than King George, who at least didn't conscript their dummy3

sons and get them killed . . . If Chipperfield had ever served in the Channel Fleet he'd have known that. And I think he did know it."

"And they did steal a boat," said Elizabeth.

"Not without difficulty—with tragedy, in fact." He sighed.

"That was where the midshipman got it?" said Aske.

The Professor gazed at him for a moment, then nodded.

"The boats were guarded, inevitably. And the beaches themselves were patrolled—indeed, while they were lying up in the dunes the patrols were increased, with the addition of soldiers as well as mounted gendarmes."

Aske caught Elizabeth's eye, but didn't interrupt.

"After four days their water ran out, and they were of a mind to give up the attempt, and try again later. But then there came a thick sea-mist, and they chanced it." Wilder paused, and then lifted a hand in a sad little gesture. "Paget was killed as they were manhandling the boat into the sea—a mounted gendarme came out of the mist behind them, and took one shot at them—' but one ball was discharged, yet that a fatal one' ... I suspect those are Parson Ward's words, rather than what Tom Chard said. But that's probably true of much of the Chard narrative, it's a sight too pedantic in places for an unlettered man, though the sense is right. . . No, what I think Chard meant was that the odds against a French policeman hitting what he was aiming at with a cavalry carbine were about one in a million. But this was that one-in-dummy3

a-million that had the boy's name on it."

After all they'd been through, thought Elizabeth, after all they'd achieved against impossible odds, it had been a too-cruel end for Chipperfield and Paget both, who might otherwise have lived to be admirals. But then how many other admirals and generals—and prime ministers and surgeons and scientists . . . and good husbands and loving sons—had been cut off by chance bullets ahead of their time?

Even Father's shell, which had only maimed him, had changed history to bring her here. But there was no point in mourning any of these mischances; one could only trust that the cause had been just, the quarrel honourable, as King Harry's soldiers had hoped before Agincourt.

"So he handed them that box," Wilder pointed at the Vengeful box on the table, "and he died."

" That box?" repeated Aske incredulously. "Are you telling us that they carried that box all the way from . . . from Lautenbourg—no, all the way from the Vengeful—?"

"That's what it looks like. 'The surgeon's case', Tom Chard calls it." Wilder nodded. "That box, I think—yes."

Aske stared at the box. "But—for God's sake—what was in it?" Then he looked at Elizabeth. "Did you know this—about the box?"

Elizabeth shook her head. "What was in the box, Professor?"

"That bastard Mitchell played his cards close to his chest!"

murmured Aske savagely to himself.

dummy3

"Mitchell?" inquired Wilder.

"Never mind him, sir." Aske blinked. "What was in the box?"

"Nothing, Mr Aske. It was empty."

"You mean . . . they lost what was in it?"

"I mean just what I said: it was empty when they opened it. If Tom Chard is to be believed . . . and I see no reason why he shouldn't be . . . neither he nor Timms had ever seen the inside of it until they opened it for themselves. Lieutenant Chipperfield brought it with him from the Vengeful, and he took it with him when he escaped from the fortress. And he gave it to Midshipman Paget, and Paget gave it to them. And they opened it—and it was empty."

Elizabeth and Aske stared at each other, and it was a toss-up which of them was more at sea now, thought Elizabeth—at sea in an open boat, shrouded in mist, with an empty box for company.

"So what did they do?" Elizabeth broke the silence.

"They rowed all that day, and most of the night."

"In the fog?" said Aske, suddenly irritable.

"They were picked up by a fishing boat, off Ramsgate. They were lucky, Mr Aske."

"Lucky?"

"They could have been rescued by the navy—by one of the blockade ships."

Aske nodded. "Then it would have been back to duty? But the dummy3

fishermen didn't turn them in, you mean?"

"That is correct."

"So they deserted—'R' for 'Run'—I remember, Professor.

They'd had enough of the Royal Navy!"

Wilder nodded. "Also correct. And it would have been worse for Timms—if he'd chosen to be an American, anyway."

"Of course! Because the Yankees were at war with us by then!" Aske whistled through his teeth. "It would have been Dartmoor Prison for him—would it?"

Wilder inclined his head doubtfully. "They might have taken a more lenient view. They weren't always uncivilised. But there was that risk, certainly."

It was no wonder they'd run, decided Elizabeth. Life ashore if you were poor could have been no picnic anywhere in those days. But life afloat in the twentieth year of the war with France would have been a worse bargain. And if any men had done their bit, Tom Chard and Abraham Timms had done theirs.

"And yet that isn't the whole truth, I suspect," said Wilder gently. "I think . . . from what Tom Chard said between Parson Ward's lines ... I think they still reckoned they were under their officer's orders." He paused. "I think that they were simple men—Timms less simple than Chard, but both essentially simple men." His eyes fell to the Vengeful box. "It is possible that I am imagining too far now . . . but they had their orders . . . and they had that. . . and simple men tend to dummy3

approach life's problems literally."

"And what was their problem?" Aske sniffed. "Other than keeping out of the press-gang's clutches?"

"It was very simple—and very complicated. They had the surgeon's case, by which the Lieutenant had set such store . . . but they didn't know what to do with it, Mr Aske."

The box was beginning to hypnotise Elizabeth: it had come ashore from the Vengeful, against the odds of shipwreck; and it had travelled to Lautenbourg—and out of Lautenbourg, down an unclimbable cliff; and it had travelled across France in the midst of a twenty-year war, and had come through the waves from the dying midshipman into a stolen boat—and then into a Ramsgate boat, good luck cancelling bad—and finally ashore . . . the odds building up and multiplying all the way . . . and somehow, in the end, to Father, and to her . . . and now it was here, in a strange house, hypnotising her.

"They'd have done best to chuck it overboard," said Aske. "If it was empty—"

"But they didn't." Wilder sounded almost triumphant in his statement of the obvious. "It is here. So that was what they didn't do—that, at least, is certain!"

"So what did they do with it?" Aske swivelled towards Elizabeth. "How did your father get it, Miss Loftus?"

Elizabeth looked at Professor Wilder helplessly. "His crew gave it to him—the survivors—?"

dummy3

"They bought it from White and Cooper, Antiques, of Southsea, Miss Loftus." Wilder nodded. "Binnacles and barnacles, and a wealth of maritime knick-knackery, much of it spurious and all of it over-priced, according to David Audley's young man. But old Mr Cooper—who was young Mr Cooper then—remembers buying it, and selling it ... And he bought it from the intestate estate of Mrs Agnes Childe, of Cosham, with a job lot of junk, because he wanted some choice items which had been included in the lot, which he had spotted . . . And, fortunately for us, old Mr Cooper is old enough— and rich enough—not only to remember his sharp practice, but to exult in it . . . And to remember that Mrs Agnes Childe was née O'Byrne, of Ratsey and O'Byrne, ship's chandlers and merchants of Portsmouth—two very old-established families of Hampshire, in business and commerce . . . and in Parliament too, after the Reform Bill of 1832, in the Whig interest." He was looking at Elizabeth now.

"Agnes married the Honourable Algernon Childe, who got himself killed in 1915, at Ypres, with the Grenadiers. Which left only the old lady, with all her family debris—the Honourable Algernon being a younger son, with nothing to his name except his name . . . But it's the other names that ring the bell—eh, Miss Loftus?"

She knew then. Even before he reached down and opened the box-lid, she knew, because she had polished those names dozens of times.

" Amos Ratsey, Jas. O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan . . ." he read dummy3

from the plate inside the lid. "All the names of Dr William Willard Pike's grateful patients—' With the Respectful Compliments of Amos Ratsey, Jas. O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan, Edward MacBaren, Chas. Lepine, Michael Haggerty, Jas. Fitzgerald, Edmund Hoagland, Thomas Flower, Patrick Moonan of Portsmouth, Southsea and Cosham' —grateful patients all ... Or maybe not, perhaps?"

"Why not, Professor?" asked Aske.

"Who were they, Mr Aske? Men of some substance, undoubtedly— Ratsey and O'Byrne were, certainly!" He nodded. "They did not combine their enterprises until 1815, but in 1812 they both held valuable contracts for supplying naval stores, and did business in the dockyards. And after the war they branched out into war surplus in the South American trade—guns and uniforms as well as stores and provisions . . . for the freedom fighters of those times—all quite respectable, as well as being profitable." He smiled.

"Men of substance—such men as might well respectfully compliment their physician on his patriotism, and could afford to buy him a new set of the tools of his trade."

"So what, then?"

"So who were the rest of them? Amongst my friends and contacts locally, and among the excellent employees of the Central Library and Museums staffs, not one of those names rings any bell as a local gentleman in the Portsmouth district of that time." Wilder shook his head. "There was a Tom Flower who plied his trade ferrying officers to their ships—a dummy3

one-eyed fellow with an exemption certificate in his pocket, to keep the press-gang off his back . . . And a 'Jim Fitzgerald'

jailed for sedition in 1814, for damning the King's eyes and wishing Parliament hanged, among other things . . . But neither of them sound like Dr Pike's grateful patients."

"Well, you'd hardly expect to trace everyone from those days, surely?"

"You'd be surprised, dear boy. It was a much smaller world then. I would have expected more than two at the first trawl."

He looked at Aske shrewdly. "And I would certainly have expected Dr Pike himself."

"Dr Pike ... himself?"

"There was no physician of that name practising in the Portsmouth region in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. And neither is there a Pike in any naval list my friends in Greenwich can turn up." The shrewd look came to Elizabeth. "Pandora's box, you have here, my dear: we open it, and whatever there may once have been in it, only mysteries pop out of it now."

Aske shook his head. "He needn't have been a Portsmouth man— but that won't do, will it! Not if Ratsey and O'Byrne were local . . ."

"No. But he could have been signed on by the captain of the Vengeful in a foreign port on a temporary basis—ship's surgeons came in all shapes and sizes in those days. Only the same objection still holds good—the inconvenient Messrs dummy3

Ratsey and O'Byrne—how did he know them, then?" Wilder shook his head back at Aske.

Aske made a face. "But even if we can trace them all somehow, in the end . . . that still won't tell us what was in the box." He looked sidelong at Elizabeth. "Even if we were in a position to guess, we can never know, not now."

"No, Mr Aske," said Wilder. "But we could try another guess . . . which would make the contents of the box, if any, altogether unimportant."

"What?" Momentarily Aske had been wrapped up in his own imaginings; which, Elizabeth supposed, were of Colonel Suchet's ultimate Portsmouth Plan. "If any?"

Wilder spread his hands. "We are assuming, quite reasonably, that the box contained something of value. But suppose, Mr Aske, that it was the box itself which was the thing of value? What do we have then?"

Elizabeth stared at the box. "A list of names—"

"A list of names! Precisely, Miss Loftus. Amos Ratsey, Jas.

O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan—a list of names where no one would look twice at them, even if that was what he was looking for."

"Good God!" exclaimed Aske. "Not 'Jas.' for 'Jasper'—'Jas.'

stands for James—James O'Byrne— James Burns!"

"Ah. . ." Wilder picked up Aske's excitement. "That small adjustment means something to you, does it?"

"James Burns does, by God!" Aske stepped round to get a dummy3

better view of the inside of the lid. "And half those other names are Irish—that fits too."

"More than half, dear boy," amended Wilder mildly. "Am I to assume from this that James O'Byrne, alias Burns, was a French agent? And the others were his friends? His spy-ring, or whatever the term they favoured then? A Franco-Hibernian group, anyway—wild geese come home to roost, eh?"

Had that been his guess all along, wondered Elizabeth; but because he hadn't lost his good teacher's preference for drawing out his pupils he'd let them come to it in their own way?

"Franco-Irish-American, perhaps." Aske's second thoughts were more cautious. "We've still got a lot of checking ahead of us ... but it does fit some of our facts quite well—don't you agree, Miss Loftus?"

Elizabeth nodded, yet found herself drawn to the expression on the old man's face: it was as though he was willing her to go on, to build more elaborately on their card-house of guesses.

A tragedy, he had said. And there was a hint of sadness in that look of his, which reminded her of that.

"Amos Ratsey and James . . . Burns," she began tentatively.

"If they were spies, they were never caught, were they?"

Wilder shook his head. "No. They both flourished like the proverbial green bay-tree after the war. That is a fact—a dummy3

historical fact."

"Huh! They cut their losses, and joined the winning side,"

said Aske. "But after the retreat from Moscow they didn't have much choice—Moscow, and then the failure of the American invasion of Canada . . . and then Napoleon was beaten at Leipzig, and Wellington crossed the Pyrenees from Spain—what else could they do but keep their heads down and hope no one rumbled them?"

Amos Ratsey and James Burns had lived to keep their secret

—a secret which Tom Chard hadn't known when he told his part of the tale, years afterwards, to Parson Ward. But that wasn't a tragedy—it was more like the luck of the Irish. So what—

"What I'd like to know is how the devil Agnes—what was her name? Agnes née O'Byrne, anyway—how she got hold of

that?" Aske pointed at the Vengeful box. "Chard and Timms must have brought it ashore. But what did they do with it then, I wonder?"

That was it: Humphrey Aske had been tracking her own thoughts, but somehow he'd overtaken her on the home straight.

She stared at Wilder. "They gave it to James Burns, of course.

Is that what they did, Professor?"

"I don't know, Miss Loftus." He stared back at her. "Yet that would seem like another very fair guess . . . Or, let's say, I can think of no other way it could have become an O'Byrne dummy3

family heirloom."

Aske frowned. "Why on earth did they give it to him?" He shook his head. "Timms and Chard weren't spies, for God's sake, were they?"

"That they were not, Mr Aske. I think they were good men and true—true to their salt, even the American. I believe that they must have come ashore with it, but they didn't know what to do with it. So they read the names on the lid—or Abraham Timms did—the names and the places . . . and they decided to deliver the box to one of those names. They may have looked for Ratsey first—or maybe O'Byrne was the first name they traced." He shrugged. "It's even possible they were aware they ought to give it to someone in authority, but they couldn't do that, could they?"

"You're darn right! Not if they were also busy deserting! Even going back to Portsmouth would have been like putting their heads in the lion's mouth—that would be one hell of a risk for them. But why should they want to do that?"

"Why indeed?" Wilder's voice was gentle. "Why do men do brave deeds—if I knew that I would be wiser than I am! How did the O'Byrne family get the box? We don't know—but they did get it ... And why did O'Byrne keep the box?" He smiled.

"But he did keep it, for here it is—and that was an irrational act. And that is what men do, Mr Aske: they act irrationally, as their instincts prompt them to do." He stopped smiling.

"Or it could be that Chard and Timms were simply keeping faith with men they admired—' a noble-hearted and humane dummy3

officer' was how Tom Chard described his lieutenant—and little Paget was a ' high-spirited young gentleman' . . .

Keeping faith is another irrational act, more often than not.

But men will persist in doing it."

Elizabeth shivered. "How awful!"

"Awful?" Aske snuffled as though amused. "If it's true, I'd like to have seen Burns's face when they turned up with it—it must have put the fear of God up him!" He chuckled. "And then the relief when he twigged they were deserters! I'll bet he filled their pockets with guineas to enable them to make themselves scarce, too . . . If it's true it's a damn good story, I'll say that for it!"

Elizabeth was scandalised. "But it's an awful story, Mr Aske!

The lieutenant and the midshipman—they went through all that, and then they died for nothing— absolutely nothing!"

The enormity of the Vengeful tragedy suddenly enveloped her. "They all died for nothing, really—"

"Chard and Timms got away, remember!" Aske moved to make amends.

"But they gave the box to Burns—of all men—"

Aske seemed to be trying not to smile. "But it didn't matter either way by then, Miss Loftus. There wasn't going to be an invasion by then, anyway. It was all for nothing from the start

—that's what I mean. Don't you see the irony of it?"

Irony? thought Elizabeth. It was the uselessness of all that courage and endurance and ingenuity which cut so deep. The dummy3

irony was merely an insult added to that injury.

"But cheer up, Miss Loftus." Aske managed to make the smile almost kindly. "Professor Wilder may still be quite wrong, you know. There could be other explanations—dozens of them . . . We don't know who Dr Pike was yet, for a start—

or how he and his amazing box got aboard the Vengeful. . .

And Timms could have been an American agent—a sort of prototype CIA man—and we don't know how he joined the Vengeful either. . . All we know is that we've a lot more work to do. But now at least we know where to start looking."

Professor Wilder reached down to close the lid of the box, replacing the Guardian on it as though to cover up the dark tale he had conjured from it. "And I can probably help you there. I have contacts on both sides of the Atlantic."

They were both trying to jolly her out of her depression, but she couldn't be lifted so easily. There was something malevolent about that box—and about the long-lost Vengeful herself, too. The Vengeful was to blame for everything, it seemed to her suddenly.

"She was an unlucky ship." The words discharged her feelings. "She killed them all—all but two."

"My dear . . . they were all unlucky ships, the Vengefuls," said Wilder softly.

"What?" She looked at him in surprise.

"Didn't your father ever tell you? They had the reputation for being killers. Great fighters too, to be fair—' Storm and dummy3

tempest/fear and foes/ They'll be with her where/ the Vengeful goes' —that's what they used to say about her.

Didn't he tell you?"

She shook her head.

"That was one reason why they re-named the thirteenth Vengeful, my dear. Add unlucky thirteen to a bad-luck name, and that's a sure recipe for disaster." He pointed to the box.

"And the navy's got too much riding on her for anything to be allowed to go wrong this time."

"What d'you mean—this time?" She didn't understand.

"It's in the paper today." He stooped and picked up the Guardian— it had been the newspaper, not the box, at which he had pointed. "' Wonder ship on missile tests' —" he passed the paper to her "—you can read it for yourself."

Elizabeth took the paper automatically. There was a large, slightly blurred picture of one of those ugly modern warships, all top-heavy with modern gadgetry, which were so different from the greyhounds of Father's time.

She read the caption: " HMS Shannon, the Navy's new anti-submarine command vessel, leaving the pier at the Kyle of Lochalsh base for trials with the air-dropped Stingray anti-submarine missile and the new generation heavyweight torpedo" .

And the story was in bold type below the Wondership heading: " High ranking American and NATO naval officers shipped aboard the latest addition to the Royal Navy's anti-dummy3

submarine capability, the command vessel HMS Shannon, yesterday.

"They left the new pier at the Kyle of Lochalsh for a demonstration of anti-submarine warfare in Europe's only offshore range, the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre, in 10 square miles of the inner Sound of Raasay, off the west Ross-shire coast of Scotland.

" The 'Shannon' will show off weapons systems which the Government hopes to sell to NATO on the top-secret range, which boasts a multi-million pound installation of sea-bed hydrophones and cable links to a mainland computer ..."

"What wonder ship?" asked Aske.

"The Shannon," said Elizabeth.

" In attendance will be a small fleet of auxiliary ships and one of the navy's nuclear-powered attack submarines, HMS

'Swiftsure', which it is thought will be playing the part of a Soviet intruder ..."

"What's that got to do with us, for heaven's sake?" said Aske a little tetchily.

"See for yourself." Elizabeth handed him the Guardian.

" Wonder ship on missile tests?" Aske wrinkled his nose at the headline, and then studied the text briefly. "Very interesting, I'm sure . . . But, more to the point, Professor—

can you give us the names of those contacts of yours? I think we'll be needing them."

Wilder inclined his head. "In anticipation of just that request, dummy3

Mr Aske, I have prepared a little list for you." He produced a long white envelope from his breast pocket. "For the Americans I have also written brief letters of introduction.

For the English, it will be sufficient to mention my name . . .

And now I must be away, regretfully." He bowed to Elizabeth.

Aske looked at Elizabeth quickly. "But won't you stay, Professor? I'm sure Mrs Audley will expect us to ask you to ...

and we do still need your brains, sir."

"No. I think you'll do very well without me." Wilder spoke with the resolution of a grandee. "Besides which, at my age one becomes a creature of habit, and my housekeeper has a steak-and-kidney pie and a bottle of Beaune waiting for me ... And these August evenings are closing in, and it will be dark soon, and the forecast is for rain . . . and I have an hour's drive ahead of me. So thank you—but no." He turned for a last time to Elizabeth. "Miss Loftus ... it has been a pleasure. And I hope you will regard me as a friend now, and will call on me. I see far too few young women these days."

"Professor . . ." In any other circumstances she would have been nattered by that, and would have reacted to it somehow.

But her mind was bobbing wildly in the Shannon's wake, somewhere between Kyle of Lochalsh and the inner Sound of Raasay.

"I can see that your brain's full of new thoughts!" He smiled impishly. "And that's what makes the historian, Miss Loftus—

the sudden fertilisation of knowledge by intelligence, to dummy3

breed some tiny embryo of truth! Nurture it, Miss Loftus, nurture it and cherish it!" He swung back to Aske. "Now, Mr Aske—?"

Aske gave Elizabeth another of his quick looks. "Yes, Professor . . . Allow me to see you out—"

They went, leaving Elizabeth to her own thoughts, which were carrying her on an irresistible tide past the old Vengeful on the rocks of Les Echoux and the Fortuné on the Horse Sands, towards the Shannon—

The door-latch clattered again eventually.

"That wasn't overwhelmingly civilised, Miss Loftus, if I may say so," Aske chided her. "The old boy expected a more graceful dismissal, after all his trouble, you know."

She heard him, but the words hardly registered; she could think only . . . if I can see it, why can't he see it?

He shook his head. "Maybe he wasn't quite expecting a peck on the cheek. But you could at least have shaken his hand."

Her confidence ebbed. If it meant nothing to him when it was so obvious, then perhaps it was nothing—a thing long since considered and discarded.

"Now the poor old boy believes you still haven't forgiven him for whatever it was he quarrelled over with your father—"

Whatever it was?

"—and we still may need his help, Miss Loftus."

He didn't know! It seemed impossible to her. But then, when dummy3

she remembered how contemptuous Paul had been of him, and how Paul had gone about everything, it suddenly didn't seem so unlikely—it almost became inevitable, rather—

"Miss Loftus?" He had realised at last that she was only half listening to him.

"Don't you know what they quarrelled about, Mr Aske?"

"Does it matter?"

Did it matter? Even if he didn't know, Paul did—and Dr Audley must know too . . . Was it possible that they hadn't seen the wood for the trees? Or was there simply no wood to see?

"It was over the Shannon, Mr Aske."

"Oh?" His glance flicked to the Guardian. "Well, I hardly think that matters." He sounded as though he was finding politeness difficult. "Does it?"

"She was originally named the Vengeful—until about eighteen months ago, when they were fitting her out. Father got very angry about the re-naming."

"Did he, indeed?" He started to yawn, then quickly put his hand to his mouth. "Mmm?"

"Doesn't that . . ." Diffidence almost froze her, but for a tiny red spark of anger which his boredom kindled ". . . doesn't that suggest anything to you?"

"Well ... to be honest, Miss Loftus, the only thing I can think about at the moment is my dinner. That's what the Professor's steak-and-kidney pie did for me, I'm afraid." He dummy3

indicated the door. "Shall we go and see what that precocious child is up to?" He smiled. "Then—"

The spark blazed into fire. " Mr Aske!"

He raised his hands. "All right, all right! The Shannon was once the Vengeful. Then so what?"

"Can't you see? Isn't it possible that we—that you—and Dr Mitchell and Dr Audley—that you've all been following the wrong Vengeful?"

He looked at her strangely, no longer bored, but with an expression in which so many emotions conflicted that there was no room for any one of them. "What do you mean—the wrong—?"

She had to get it right. "This finding out what really happened in 1812, Mr Aske—you don't really care about that

—you can't care about it ... It's what's happening now that you care about—about . . ." she licked her lips ". . . about what the Russians are doing." She forced the bogey-name out, even though it sounded unreal to her, on her own lips: she shouldn't be telling him this—it had nothing to do with her.

"The . . . Russians, Miss Loftus?" He seemed to sense her embarrassment, but was not disposed to help her. "The Russians?"

Only her anger sustained her. "Paul told me about this thing

—this Project Vengeful—"

"He told you that?" Aske's own anger sparked suddenly. "He dummy3

had absolutely no right to do any such thing! That's quite appalling!"

"But he did, Mr Aske." She hated Aske then, as irrationally as she loved Paul, so that both emotions were equally painful to her. "He trusted me."

"That's what's so appalling!" snarled Aske. "My God! I'll see him hang for that!"

"You'll see him hang?" Elizabeth's loyalty fixed itself irrevocably on Paul. "But you'll phone London first, Mr Aske."

"I'll phone London?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

Why? But she wasn't going to argue with him. "Because I want you to do that—that's why."

Not for Humphrey Aske was Paul's Theory of Contemporaneity— that would only make him laugh at her, and at Paul too!

"That's not a reason, Miss Loftus. I'm not about to make myself a fool for you."

Then more fool he! But she wasn't, in her turn, about to explain why the timing of the Russians' Vengeful Project and the re-naming of the Vengeful made sense to her: if that was foolishness, it must be hers, not Paul's. That was the least she could do for him.

dummy3

"Then I'll phone London, Mr Aske. Cathy will give me a number—she's precocious enough for that. Or there'll be a number somewhere—I'll go on phoning until I get it, starting from 999 and working upwards, even if I'm still trying to find it when Faith Audley gets back—and then she'll give it to me." She looked down at him obstinately. "And then we'll see who's the fool—you or me."

"I already know who the fool is." He tried to stare her down, and she felt his will harden against hers, as it had never hardened before. But that only made it a straight contest, and in a contest she outnumbered him—all the ghosts from the past crowded behind Commander Loftus's daughter: Lieutenant Chipperfield and Midshipman Paget, and Tom Chard and Abraham Timms, who had kept faith and had done their duty after their fashion, even though faith and duty had made fools of them.

His will crumbled against such odds. "Very well. I give you best, Miss Loftus—I'll telephone for you, if that's what you want. But on your head be it. What do you want me to say?"

"Just remind them that the Shannon used to be the Vengeful."

"Is that all?" He seemed on the point of refusing again, but then thought better of it. "All right. But you stay here while I phone—if I have to make a fool of myself I'd prefer to do it by myself. I'll do it on those terms only."

"Thank you, Mr Aske."

dummy3

He stared at her. "I think I'd rather you didn't thank me, Miss Loftus."

Time stood still as she waited: the effort of imposing her will on him seemed to have drained her energy, and she found it impossible to concentrate on anything except the need to wait patiently. The house was very quiet, she thought.

Then the door opened, and Aske was staring at her again.

"I'm sorry, Miss Loftus," he said.

"Sorry?"

"I owe you an apology." His lips tightened. "We have to go to London now—at once." The skin had tightened on his face too, heightening the cheek-bones and jaw-line with stress; except that such a transformation must be in her own mind, imagined out of the change in his manner.

"We've got to go to London?" she echoed him stupidly.

" You have. I have to take you there." The stretched skin shivered. "I spoke to David Audley. I told him what you said about the Shannon—and the Vengeful. He was ... he was rather upset by it, Miss Loftus."

Her mouth opened. "David Audley?"

He nodded. "I spoke to him. He's getting a message to Kyle of Lochalsh, to our security people there. They're going to abort the trials, Miss Loftus."

Her mouth closed, but her brain swirled. "You spoke to ...

David Audley?"

"Yes." He gestured urgently. "Come on— at once means what dummy3

it says in our business. It means drop whatever you're doing and move— it means this instant, Miss Loftus. It means now

—" he turned on his heel and opened the door for her.

She couldn't think straight. "But, Mr Aske—"

"Come on, Miss Loftus— now!"

She went through the door. The passage was dark now, no longer green-shadowed, with the feeble light of the distant chandelier in the hall blackening the windows.

He overtook her at the entrance, reaching past her to lift the heavy iron latch on the outer door.

She didn't want to go outside, even though outside was only blue-grey, and much lighter than the yellow gloom around her.

"Quickly, Miss Loftus—" He handed over her raincoat.

Cobwebs of rain drifted around her, and the wet smell of the countryside entered her lungs—the smell of growing things, sharpened by a distant hint of autumn to come.

Aske crunched past her on the gravel, reaching this time for the car door—swinging it open for her.

No!

He was already moving round the front of the car, as though he took for granted that the open door must suck her in, regardless of her own free will.

She straightened up. "I can't go just like this, Mr Aske. I must say goodbye to Cathy."

dummy3

She didn't wait for his reaction, but turned on her heel back towards the house.

Through the door again—then to the doorway into which Cathy had disappeared—through that door—

A waft of warmer air and light engulfed her simultaneously: the kitchen was huge and bright with the innumerable reflections of electricity on copper pots hanging in descending size from a great beam, and Cathy herself was bending over the kitchen table—a great expanse of ancient working surface which looked as if it had been not so much scrubbed as holystoned colourless like the old Vengeful's quarterdeck, only by generations of kitchen-maids under cook's eagle eye.

"Oh, Elizabeth!" Cathy half-straightened up over her own small area of chaos in the expanse. "Something's gone wrong with Mummy's crèmes brulées—they haven't bruléed properly, darn it!"

"Where's your father, Cathy?"

"He isn't back yet." Cathy bent over the chaos.

"But you said he went somewhere with your mother?"

"Um—yes." Cathy prodded one of the messes tentatively.

"They went to Guildford to look at curtain material."

"Together?"

"Uh-huh. She's been on at him for ages—it's for his study, so she says he's got to like it. And when he couldn't go to France she said she'd got him at last." The child looked up again.

dummy3

"He was waiting for you, but he didn't expect you so early—

he'll be back any moment, I should think."

"He didn't go to London?"

"Why should he go to London?" Cathy looked puzzled. "The curtain shop's in Guildford."

"Could he have changed his mind?"

"Why should he do that? It's a super shop." Cathy licked her finger. "He didn't, anyway."

"How do you know, dear?"

"Because he left the telephone number. He always leaves it, when he knows where he's going, in case an urgent message comes. So if he'd changed his mind he'd have phoned. That's the proper drill, you see, Elizabeth." The child spoke with all the certainty of someone who knew her drill and was proud of being a Ranger's daughter. "And he wouldn't leave Mummy in Guildford—there are no buses home . . . What's the matter, Elizabeth?"

The front door clattered.

"They'll be back soon," Cathy reassured her. "They must be caught in the traffic."

Elizabeth walked quickly round the table and picked up one of the brulées.

"Miss Loftus!" said Aske sharply from behind her.

"You're right, dear." She scrutinised the brulée closely.

"Could it be something to do with the sugar you used?"

dummy3

" Miss Loftus!" He sounded close to bruléeing himself.

"I was just coming, Mr Aske." She allowed herself a touch of irritability, but then smiled at the child. "I would leave them, if I were you, Cathy dear—they'll be all right." She set the brulée down among its fellows. "But now we must go, dear—"

she started moving as she spoke.

"What?" squeaked Cathy. "But, Elizabeth—"

"Must go!" She blotted out the child's voice with her own as she accelerated out of the kitchen. "Give my love to your mother, and tell her I'll be back soon—" Aske was standing aside for her, but was looking past her at the child, and that wouldn't do " —come on, Mr Aske, then! Don't just stand there!" She checked her advance momentarily, long enough to shepherd him ahead of her before the child could betray them both, almost pushing him. Yet even as he moved, he did so crab-wise and doubtfully, still looking past her, as though spiked on a dilemma.

"Elizabeth!" she heard Cathy call behind her.

“That poor child!" snapped Elizabeth severely at Aske. "You didn't give me a chance to explain—she won't know what to think . . . . Do you want me to go back? Have we time for that? Surely we have?" She slowed down perceptibly.

"No." Aske's doubts resolved themselves. "We must go—

you're right. I'll get David Audley to phone her."

The delicate spatter of rain had increased to a drizzle slanting out of a uniformly grey-black sky pressing down on them, out dummy3

of which the dark had come prematurely.

"A damned dirty night," said Aske. "And by the look of it there's most of it still to come. Fasten your seat-belt, Miss Loftus. The roads are going to be slippery."

Elizabeth fastened her belt unwillingly: it was like snapping her freedom away.

Then the engine was alive; and in quick succession the headlights blazed ahead, darkening the half-light, and the windscreen wipers swept the rain away contemptuously.

"Where are we going?" She tried to push back the reality with a matter-of-fact question as the car moved forward.

Fact—matter-of- fact: they had turned themselves inside out with so many theories, these last twenty-four hours, that the fact of his deliberate lie filled her mind like a monstrous plant in a hot-house which had stifled all other growth.

"London," he answered eventually. "I told you."

"But where exactly?"

"One of our places. You don't really need to know, and I'm not at liberty to say, anyway—sorry." He shook his head apologetically.

She tried to think. "Paul said we should stay inside the house, and not go anywhere."

"Yes. But Dr Audley says otherwise, and he outranks Dr Mitchell. He's the boss." He braked suddenly, and swung the wheel. In the half-gloom Elizabeth missed the signpost and could see only that they had taken a more minor road at a dummy3

junction.

She tried to look over her shoulder. "I think you've taken the wrong road—"

"This is a short-cut. Don't worry."

They were never going to meet Audley and Faith coming back from Guildford on this road, thought Elizabeth.

"You must be tired," said Aske solicitously. "Why don't you lie back and close your eyes, and leave the navigation to me?

I'll wake you up in good time."

"Yes. . ." She was aware of the truth of what he had said: under her present mental confusion and disquiet she was bone-weary. So much had happened so quickly, and all of it so strange and so frightening, that it was no wonder she couldn't think straight—that she was starting to imagine things . . . and it was all beyond her understanding in any case. There was nothing she could do ... there never had been anything she could do, from the start she had been helpless, pushed one way, then pulled another—it was her role in life, it seemed. "Yes . . . perhaps I will."

"That's right . . . You can let the seat back, if you like—there's a catch down by the side somewhere."

"Yes." She fumbled between the seats.

"Don't undo the safety-belts by mistake . . . When we've had our little talk with Dr Audley I'll put you into a nice hotel for the night," he said soothingly.

A little talk with Dr Audley, she thought to herself almost dummy3

lethargically—she could feel the seat-belt releases, but not the seat-reclining catch, darn it!—but that was one thing she wasn't going to have . . .

"Then you can dream about Lieutenant Chipperfield, and Mr Midshipman Paget, and Chard and Timms, and all the rest of them," murmured Aske.

Elizabeth's hand found the catch, and closed on it.

Lieutenant Chipperfield, and Midshipman Paget, and Tom Chard, and Abraham Timms—they had all been trapped by misfortune, far from home and in a hostile land—

The car slowed.

"What is it?" asked Elizabeth.

"There's a phone-box just ahead." Aske brought the car to a halt, and Elizabeth saw the dim-lighted box in the headlights.

"There's another routine call I've just remembered I ought to make, in case anyone phones the house. I won't be a moment, Miss Loftus."

They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, with no other light in sight through the rain-blurred windows of the car, and only a road sign warning "Bend" picked out in the dipped beams as an evidence of civilisation.

She stared at the shadowy figure in the phone-box, and a terrible certainty consumed her, driving out everything else—

dummy3

a certainty built out of innumerable small happenings cemented to that one great lie by an instinct which was suddenly so strong that she could feel her hand on the seat-catch shake—

Treachery!

Treachery? But if not treachery—if she was wrong?

No. No, no, no, no, no— treachery!

"Well, that's all right, then!" said Aske cheerfully, glancing at her quickly as he let out the clutch. "But you haven't put the seat down yet—you'll doze much better with it down."

The car was accelerating fast. Elizabeth could see the red reflectors of the bend in the distance.

"I can't find the catch," said Elizabeth hoarsely.

"I'll find it for you—" he took one hand off the wheel.

Faster—the rain slashed down on to the screen—

"No—I've got it now!" said Elizabeth.

"Fine. Sweet dreams, Miss Loftus, then."

There were no sweet dreams, only nightmares in which the red reflectors burned like eyes, increasing in numbers as the car entered the bend.

Elizabeth released Aske's safety-belt and twisted the wheel into the red eyes.

dummy3

EPILOGUE:

The fate of the hero's daughter

THE CAR DOOR slammed outside, but Mitchell discovered that he didn't want to get up now, after having listened so attentively for so long for any slightest distant noise which might herald Audley's return: somewhere along the line of time marked by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner he had ceased to expect good news and had started to fear the worst, his unwillingness told him.

And the fear only took hold of him more strongly as he glanced down at the papers on the desk in front of him: his own hand-written account of the untimely passing of Patrick Lawrence Donaghue, William Harold Fullick and Julian Alexander Carrell Oakenshaw, each of whom had died by the hand which had wielded the pen; and, beside it, impeccably-typed, Del Andrew's report on the three dead men— Copies to the Prime Minister's Office (restricted); the Home Secretary (restricted); the Director of Public Prosecutions (restricted); The Acting-Director, DI/R & D (Col.J. Butler, CBE, MC).

Everything was relative to the occasion, he thought. For the past three days he had been worried sick about all this, and it had been in the back of his mind, warping his judgement and disturbing his concentration the whole time except for that one hour with Elizabeth, when he had exchanged need for dummy3

need.

But now the bill for that one hour had been delivered, and he couldn't pay it: he didn't give a damn any more for the three men he'd killed, yet the thought of Elizabeth, whom he had failed to preserve, was a cure for the original sickness more expensive and painful than he could endure.

It was no good: he had to make himself get up—he couldn't put it off any longer. What was coming, was coming whether he wanted to hear it or not.

He got up, and walked to the door. He felt stiff with sitting, and very tired, and cold inside and out—the house itself was cold now, he could feel the chill of it on his cheeks and on the tip of his nose.

Not again, he prayed to himself, not again.

The sound of the door seemed unnaturally loud, as all sounds always did in the small hours. But it wasn't the only one loose in the Old House; there were other noises night-walking in it now.

Not Elizabeth— Frances he could accept, had learned to accept— but not Elizabeth too, for Christ's sake!

A board creaked loudly, and he saw Faith Audley halfway down the staircase, enveloped in a red velvet dressing-gown with a fur collar, her pale hair unbound, like a ghost out of the Old House's past. Then the kitchen door at the end of the passage ahead of him banged open, and Audley came through, and he was nothing like any sort of ghost: rain dummy3

glistened on his face and plastered down his hair, and he carried a bulging brief-case under one arm and an untidily unfurled umbrella under the other.

"What the hell's going on, David?" said Mitchell.

Audley blinked vaguely at him. "You may well ask! There's a gutter blocked above the kitchen door, and I got a face-full of water as I came in, and I can't see a thing!"

Faith Audley swept down the last of the stairs and relieved her husband of his burdens, setting them down at his feet.

"We've been very worried, David," she said tightly.

"Oh?" Audley produced a huge silk handkerchief and began to dry off the lenses of his spectacles. "I should have phoned, of course— yes." He held up the spectacles to the light. "But I'm here now."

Faith caught Mitchell's eye. "Not worried about you—about Elizabeth. And Mr Aske."

"About Elizabeth?" Audley brought the spectacles down slightly, so that for an instant he was observing Mitchell through them. "What do you know about Elizabeth?"

"We don't know anything about her." Mitchell heard the sound of desperation, rather than righteous anger, in his voice. "Where is she, damn it?"

"But you're worried about her?" Audley hooked the spectacles over his ears with maddening clumsiness. "Why?"

There was no point in letting anger take over from desperation. "When I got back from London she'd gone—

dummy3

they'd both gone. And you'd gone too . . ." Steady. "I told Aske quite specifically that he wasn't to let her out of the house."

"And I told Paul that you were worried when you left," said Faith.

Audley cast a reproachful look at his wife, then came back to Mitchell. "So what did you do?"

"I phoned the Duty Officer, of course." Steady!

"And what did he say?"

To hell with steadiness! "Damn it, David—you know what he said! Where the hell is she? What's happened?"

Audley's face became obstinate. "What did the Duty Officer say?"

This time Mitchell refused to catch Faith's eye. "The first time he said there was an all-points alarm out on her, and I was told to sit tight. And the second time he referred me to you, fairly politely . . . And the third time he told me to get the hell off the line, he was busy—okay?"

"Okay. So he told you—to go to bed, and mind your own business!" Audley was adamantine. "So why aren't you in bed minding it?"

" Ff—Elizabeth is my business!" Is or was? he heard himself cry out in pain " Where is she?"

Faith Audley stirred, tossing back the pale mane of her hair.

"Where is she, David?"

dummy3

Audley dropped Mitchell instantly, as though he didn't matter, frowning and pointing at his wife accusingly. "Come on, love—we have a treaty on this—this is business—"

"But she was a guest in my house, David." Obstinacy slammed head-on against obstinacy. "And she wasn't— isn't—

one of your people ... So I have a right to know—I don't care what lies you tell Paul here— I want to know— right?"

There was some ancient quarrel here—something between them that Mitchell couldn't even guess at, but cared about less.

"David—"

"No, Paul!" Faith cut him off. "Leave this to me ... David—I will have an answer."

"All right, love." Audley caved in directly, and so quickly that he took Mitchell by surprise. "She's alive. And she's safe. My word on it."

"Thank you, David." This time Faith Audley didn't catch Mitchell's eye, she stared directly at him as though to confirm the truth of her husband's given word. "And now I'll go back to bed again." She gave them both a sudden tired smile, not of understanding, but of relief. "If you two have things to discuss, the study will be warmer than out here. But don't stay up too long—you both look exhausted."

As Mitchell followed Audley the words began to sink in: alive and safe— alive and safe— alive and safe. He was aware that they were incomplete words, and that they might have other dummy3

implications. But for that moment they were all he could handle— alive and safe was enough for this moment, that was all.

"What's all that on the desk?" said Audley. He took three steps and peered down at the papers. "What on earth are you bothering with this for?" He frowned accusingly at Mitchell.

"You should have been watching over Elizabeth Loftus—not messing with this!"

Mitchell came back to reality. "There was a message waiting for me at Heathrow when our plane landed."

"About this? From whom?"

"From Del Andrew. Or ... not exactly a message—he just tipped me off that CI 6 was sniffing around, and I'd better get my report into the pipeline before they made it official."

"Damnation!" Audley smote his forehead. "That makes two mistakes I've made—three, counting tonight—" he glanced at the grandfather clock "—or this morning . . . God, I'm slipping!"

"What mistakes?"

"Your Elizabeth Loftus, for one." Audley looked at Mitchell keenly. "You like her, do you? That's the reason for this inquisition, is it?"

Steady again. "I think she's quite a woman—if you must know, David. . .Yes—I like her."

"Yes." The look became rueful. "My dear wife told me as much a couple of nights back—she knew, and I couldn't see dummy3

it! I said she wasn't your type, and she isn't . . . But she said I'd better watch out—that you'd get awkward if things started to go wrong."

Curiosity. "And that was your first mistake?"

"That was my third mistake. My first was not to realise quite how bright she really was— is, thank God!" He drew a deep breath. "It never occurred to me that she'd put the whole thing together—or half the thing . . . and the most dangerous half, too! God Almighty!" He shook his head.

Humiliation. What had Elizabeth put together that Paul Mitchell had missed?

And double humiliation: unlike Elizabeth, who didn't know Audley as he did, he ought to have known that there was something to put together, because with Audley there always was. And what made it worse was that, in a sense, he had known all along—

"I really am rather an idiot," said Audley. "I thought I'd got it worked out so well, for once."

"Oh, yes?" If that was the case, then there was no point in exploding, Mitchell decided. "But just tell me one thing, David—I am curious about one thing . . ."

Audley blinked at him. "Yes?"

"Can you tell me what the hell I've been doing?"

"Ah . . ." Audley blinked again, and then looked round the room. "Now ... if we were in the library I could show you, from David Chandler's book on Marlborough. But then, as dummy3

you're a military historian, you won't need to read about it—

you'll know it already."

"Know what?"

"The battle of Ramillies—1706."

"What about the battle of Ramillies?"

"He won it by a diversion: he lured all the French troops to his right flank by attacking there. Then he hit them in the centre."

A nasty suspicion crystallised in Mitchell. "Are you telling me that I've been on the right flank of your army?"

"No . . . that's not the point—" Audley's face creased "—the point is that Marlborough didn't actually tell the troops on the right that the real attack was in the centre, any more than Monty told us in Normandy that our job was to draw off all the German armour so that the Americans could break out elsewhere." He gave Mitchell a twisted smile. "We wouldn't actually have mutinied if we'd known . . . but he was right not to tell us. Because the Germans would never have believed that we were the main attack if we hadn't believed it first ourselves, you see. And, in a way, we were right to believe in it, Paul, because our diversionary bloodbath was essential to the breakout—it was all the same battle. And I like to think, when I remember absent friends, that we had the place of honour in it, if not the glory."

Mitchell's eyes strayed to the reports on the table. "The place of honour" was gift-wrapped bullshit for his benefit. But that dummy3

"diversionary bloodbath" was an accurate description for what had happened on Saturday evening.

Or worse than that, even. "So those three—" he pointed "—I killed them ... as a diversion?"

"Ah . . . no, you mustn't think of it like that. You saved a valuable life—perhaps a very valuable life. It was like saving a child from three mad dogs—you had no choice."

"But it wasn't planned—it wasn't part of any plan?"

"It was better than we'd planned." Audley paused. "We had to convince Moscow that we were chasing the wrong Vengeful

—just for a few days they had to believe we were off in the wrong direction, and we had to give them those days. And you yourself said that the old Vengeful was exactly the sort of hare I'd be tempted to chase—so they thought so too, which was why they let you spot Novikov so easily, of course."

"But they didn't know about . . . those three . . . and Loftus's money?"

"Not a thing. But when they did, they must have been as pleased as I was—that was a pure bonus for both sides."

"But how did they know?"

"Because we made damn sure they did—"

"Wait!" Mitchell felt the plot thickening around him too fast.

"You said 'the wrong Vengeful' . So which was the right one?"

Audley shook his head. "Your old Vengeful was the right one for you, Paul—and it still is." Then he grinned. "But as your Elizabeth knows, I suppose it's unrealistic not to tell you too.

dummy3

And you'll be less trouble knowing than not knowing . . . The real Vengeful was the Shannon, of course."

Of course. Stupid. Obvious. Damn! "The Shannon?"

"We had our own word on that long ago—that the Russians were planning something . . . Not the actual project name, but just that they intended dealing with the next generation of our anti-submarine systems." Audley looked at him. "We don't have many secrets worth having, but if there's one area where we can still claim to be ahead, it's anti-submarine work."

That was true, even if it was only the natural legacy of the past, in which Britain alone of all other countries had twice nearly been beaten by the submarine, thought Mitchell.

"And their plan was made before the Vengeful was renamed?

Before she became the Shannon?"

Audley nodded. "That's right. It was as simple as that." He paused. "So Oliver St John Latimer and James Cable set up a counter-plan. An in-depth anti-espionage system, you might say . . . And that Latimer's a fat slug, but he's a bloody good operator—better than everyone except me, in fact." He gave the grandfather clock a calculating look. "As of two hours from now we're set to take out the biggest Russian espionage operation of the decade, Paul. Not in the full glare of publicity, alas—which was what Jack Butler and I wanted ...

It seems that there are political considerations which rule that out—we're only allowed Philby and Maclean and Blunt dummy3

in public . . . But for once we're about to impress NATO and our American cousins, and we're going to sell maybe a billion pounds' worth of anti-submarine systems over the next decade into the bargain, if we're lucky. And not even a Labour Government—or an SDP one—can quarrel with that."

He looked at Mitchell suddenly. "Do you understand, Paul?"

Mitchell could only nod. The stakes had been raised far beyond his limit, but at least he could nod.

Audley gestured towards the papers on the desk. "Which is why I don't think you've got anything to worry about there.

We've got too much riding on this operation to let anyone make waves about those three . . . apart from the fact that you were only doing your duty as our diversion man, in any case. And we had to have that diversion."

"So you knew about their Vengeful operation long before the Americans told us about it?"

"That's right. But when we learned that the Americans knew about it we were pretty sure the Russians would be close behind them, and we didn't want them to abort the Vengeful one—not after all the trouble we'd gone to. We had to reassure them somehow." He half-smiled at Mitchell. "So Jack Butler gave me the job of making a fool of myself. . . and I came up with the old Vengeful as an opening ploy—I was going to make a mystery of it somehow . . . Or, if it refused to stand up, we'd got a contingency plan to make something out of the other Vengeful—the submarine that was transferred to the Greek navy in '46." He nodded at Mitchell, and then dummy3

pointed to the papers again. "But then those three turned up ... and Novikov. So what we had was better than I'd hoped for—Commander Loftus's mysterious riches, and three dead gangsters . . . and the real mystery of the old Vengeful herself

—that was a gift from the gods, because it was just the thing to help them believe that the so-clever Dr Audley was about to be too clever for his own good. With a little help from them, of course."

Mitchell looked at him reproachfully. "Why didn't you trust me? For God's sake!"

"I wanted to. But it wasn't my operation, and Latimer wanted you to be out of it." Audley shook his head. "The trouble was ... I think the clever Dr Audley was a little too clever for his own good" —another shake "—it never ceases to amaze me how what is basically simple becomes distorted and complicated by the human factor—I've never been able to make exactly the right allowance for that, you know . . ."

"Like what, for example?" Audley in this self-critical mood was too revealing not to encourage.

"Oh ... I never expected that smart policeman of ours to crack the source of Commander Loftus's ill-gotten gains so quickly . . .Not that it mattered—but it might have mattered."

Another shake. Then he looked at Mitchell. "And the French putting that red-headed beauty of yours on you—after they'd picked up the KGB so quickly: I didn't plan for you to be expelled from France like that, or not until our Shannon Operation was complete."

dummy3

"No?" The memory of an icy Nikki MacMahon seeing him off from the departure lounge still rankled with Mitchell too.

"No. We were meant to be sleeping soundly in Alsace by now

—you and I and your Elizabeth . . . with Comrade Aske watching over us. And after a good Alsatian dinner, too." But Audley wasn't smiling. "That's how the big things go wrong—

from too many little miscalculations."

"But . . . nothing big has gone wrong?" Safe and alive comforted Mitchell. He might never see Elizabeth again now; and even if he did he would never be able to convince her that he hadn't known about his true role—that they had both been ignorant foot-soldiers in the'same battle. But safe and alive was better than nothing—with these stakes and these players it could pass for a happy ending, near enough.

"No. Nothing seems to have gone wrong . . . not so far, anyway." Audley gave the grandfather clock another look.

"So long as they believe Aske and Elizabeth are both dead.

And there's no reason why they shouldn't. . . and even if they are jumpy at this end, there's not much they can do to unscramble their set-up in Scotland now, with Latimer's chaps already closing in—"

"Dead?" Mitchell's jaw dropped. "Aske ... and Elizabeth?"

"Accidentally dead." Audley adjusted his spectacles on his nose. "They ran out of road about five miles from here this evening, on the Three Pigeons bend just outside Buckland.

You may know the place—it's on the back road about a dummy3

hundred yards before the Three Pigeons pub. It's a notoriously bad place—the bend's deceptive and the camber's wrong, which is why the highways people put up the posts with the warning reflectors there, on the edge of the concrete culvert—a bad place at the best of times." He shook his head.

"It was pelting down with rain, and he was probably driving too fast. And he was tired . . . tired and scared, I'd guess ..."

The moment was unreal because what Audley was telling him had all the hallmarks of a cover story being rehearsed—

the circumstantial detail exact, the reasonable hypothesis for what had actually been an entirely different event, even the note of regret in the voice. Mitchell could remember staging similar lies himself in his time.

"There really has been an accident?"

Audley frowned. "That's what I'm telling you. They skidded and went straight through the posts into the culvert, on the back road there—but she's all right, I tell you."

"What the hell was Aske doing on the back road?" Mitchell couldn't place the bend, but he knew the Three Pigeons, he'd fortified himself there long ago, in Frances' time, before a sweaty session in this very room.

"He was making sure he didn't meet me, if you want an educated guess." Audley pushed at the spectacles again.

"But what does he say?"

"He's not saying anything. He's dead."

"Dead?"

dummy3

"He went through the windscreen." Audley's rugger-player's chin jutted out. "But that didn't kill him, it only cut him up and knocked him out. Only then he rolled off the bonnet into the ditch head-first, and there's always eighteen inches of water in that ditch, even in summer. And that killed him."

The voice matched the chin. "He drowned in eighteen inches of water, Mitchell. And six inches of mud."

Mitchell's mouth dried up. "And Elizabeth?"

"She's all right—I told you!" Audley's aggressive tone became defensive. "Three cracked ribs, and a few bruises . . . and a bit of shock, naturally. But she's a tough girl, is your Elizabeth—

women's hockey is a tough game, I'm told . . . And her seat-belt saved her, anyway."

Seat-belt?

"We've got her down as DOA—'Dead on arrival'—like Aske."

Audley's voice became suddenly softer, almost apologetic. "I was afraid you might have heard that on the grapevine somehow—it's the official version at the moment. But actually we've got her safe in Hadfield House, under wraps."

Safe in the safe house again, thought Mitchell automatically.

"She's okay.'" The big man looked at Mitchell helplessly for a moment. "I don't lie to my wife. If I have to lie to her, I refuse to tell her anything—or is that too Irish for you to understand?"

Seat-belt, thought Mitchell. "I don't believe you."

Conflicting emotions of anger and honesty warred on dummy3

Audley's face briefly. "I've talked to her. You can talk to her tomorrow, Paul—in fact, I want you to talk to her tomorrow."

Something almost approaching sympathy came out of the conflict. "That is the truth, Paul."

Mitchell shook his head. "I believe that." He searched for the right words. "But ... I didn't like Aske, David—I hated his guts, I admit that. . . But if there was one thing he was good at, it was driving a car. He was a bloody good driver—and he was proud of it." There were no right words: there were only the known and observed facts. "And he was a careful driver too—he always wore his seat-belt, no matter what. He was meticulous about seat-belts—I know, because I travelled with him. So don't give me accident."

"No . . . you're right, of course." Audley paused. "I was going to tell you, but I thought it could wait until we'd both had a few hours' sleep." Another pause. "We're both pretty tired."

"Not too tired for the truth. Come on, David."

"Very well." Audley blinked. "She killed him, Paul."

"She . . . what?" The statement was too outrageous for belief.

" Elizabeth . . . ?"

"Not deliberately." Audley was committed now. "She didn't know the culvert was there—she didn't know he'd end up face-down in eighteen inches of water . . . But she did it—she admits it."

"Did what?" Belief struggled with disbelief.

"She pressed the button on his safety-belt as she saw the red dummy3

warning reflectors ahead. And then she twisted the steering wheel."

Paul swallowed. "For God's sake, David ..."

"Why?" Audley gazed at him. "Because she's a clever young woman, Paul—and a tough-minded one, too. We both agreed on that, but we still underrated her criminally ... At least, I did. And so did Humphrey Aske—in his case fatally."

Unwillingly Mitchell began to accept what he was being told.

He had never doubted the steel in Elizabeth's backbone, in spite of her long years of the servitude which she had accepted as duty. But now he had to add a quality of ruthlessness to it which he found hard to take, even if—

" Aske—are you telling me that Aske . . . ?"

"Was one of theirs?" Audley nodded slowly. "The fact is, your Elizabeth Loftus did what I never imagined she could do: she guessed that the Shannon was the real Vengeful—quite extraordinary!"

"How the hell did she manage that?"

"It was something Professor Wilder said, apparently—she was a bit confused about it ... But then she added up two and two. Only then, unfortunately, she told Aske about it after Wilder had gone, and insisted that he phoned London . . .

Which he pretended to do, but didn't. Because that was the one connection Moscow couldn't allow, of course."

They stared at one another.

"Yes . . . we've had Comrade Aske tabbed for about six dummy3

months." Audley sighed. "Naturally, he was left in place, where he couldn't do any real harm—the usual procedure ... I think the plan was eventually to try and turn him, but I don't think it would have worked, myself. . . Because, gay or not, I have the feeling that Comrade Aske was a hard man under his camouflage . . . But we put him in the bank for a rainy day

—and then this came up, when we needed someone of theirs to keep them well-informed on how far off-target we were.

And he fitted because Latimer had been cultivating him, and Latimer also likes to keep a rival eye on me—everyone knows that, including Moscow, where they all spy on one another just the same way. So we arranged for Latimer to instruct Aske to do just that."

Mitchell felt a surge of anger. "You gave me your word that Elizabeth would be in no danger—and I gave her my word!"

"I didn't think there was any danger—"

"Not with Aske?"

"Aske was why there was no danger—that was the point, Paul. Aske was her protection, and yours: as long as he was there, helping you chase the wrong Vengeful, he'd make sure the KGB didn't do either of you any harm—your safety was vital to him."

"He didn't keep the KGB off us in France, by God!"

"Nonsense! Now you're not thinking at all, man! Aske put them on to you, like Novikov, to reassure us that we were on to something good. They wouldn't have touched you—they dummy3

were there to be seen." Audley grimaced suddenly. "The trouble was, the French saw them too. And that wasn't in the script—I wanted us all safe in France, enjoying ourselves, with Aske urging us on to greater and even more useless efforts . . . And that was my first mistake, if you like—

underrating the French . . . But then, I still couldn't imagine how anything could go wrong. You were still hot on the Vengeful—the old Vengeful—or on those fellows who escaped from Bonaparte's clutches, anyway . . . And if you got a bit bolshie I could rely on Aske keeping you up to the mark." He half shrugged. "So I whistled up Professor Wilder—I'd had him working on 1812 angles, just in case you didn't come up with anything, ever since Aske first interviewed him, just as I had Del Andrew working on Loftus. But that turned out to be the worst possible thing I could have done, almost."

Almost! Wilder plus Elizabeth had almost encompassed—

what?

"What was Aske going to do ... with Elizabeth?"

"That's another thing we're never going to know." Audley gazed at him thoughtfully. "She convinced herself he was going to kill her, and maybe that was what he was going to do ... that, or have someone else do it—he made a phone call down the road somewhere—an ambush, with a flesh-wound for him, would have bought them time, and he might have thought he'd get away with that." He paused. "But it's irrelevant now, in any case. Because I've assured her she was right, and that's what we're sticking to. For her sake, Paul—

dummy3

okay?"

What Mitchell had tried not to think about was staring at him now, with cold eyes: Elizabeth had killed a man, deliberately or not. "How is she taking it—what she's done?"

Audley reflected on the- question for a moment before replying. "Remarkably well. Anguished, rather than hysterical. She kept saying 'What else could I do?', and she wept a bit. But all things considered she's pretty steady."

Audley watched Mitchell attentively. "Does that surprise you?"

There was something not quite right, not quite healthy, about the big man's glance. "I don't know. Should it?"

"You know her better than I do." Audley was almost casual.

"Granted she knew he was lying to her—that he couldn't have talked to me . . . and there were a lot of other things she put together ... it was still a pretty drastic thing she did—for a spinster schoolmistress, don't you think?"

Yes, it was! thought Mitchell. But because the treason of that thought hurt him he reacted against it instantly.

"She's been through some pretty drastic experiences—for a spinster schoolmistress." He thought of himself. "Maybe she was tired of being pushed around by everyone."

"Yes . . ." Audley sounded disappointed. "And then there's the bloodline, of course ..."

"The bloodline?" Mitchell added Commander Hugh Loftus, VC to the list of pushers-around—perhaps him most of all!

dummy3

Audley nodded. "By Loftus, out of Varney: a captain's daughter and an admiral's grand-daughter. . . What my daughter would call 'a shield-maiden'. Or don't you go on that sort of thing much?"

Mitchell smiled. "My father was a conscientious objector—

remember?"

"That's right." Audley was unabashed. "And your grandfather a battalion commander at twenty-eight. So you come from a line of fighters one way or another, which illustrates my point." He reached for his brief-case. "I've got some interesting stuff for you here, telexed from Washington by our kindly CIA cousins."

"What?" The sudden change of subject threw Mitchell for a second, then he recalled Audley's technique. "Oh?"

"Yes. It's all rather comical, really . . ."

"Comical?" Mitchell watched him extract a folder from the case. "Comical" wasn't a word he'd have chosen.

"Yes. . ."Audley flipped open the folder and peered at its contents. "Our kindly cousins are to blame for our present predicament... If they hadn't got wind of Project Vengeful, neither Moscow nor London would have run scared—they would simply have converged on their collision course, and you and I ... and Miss Loftus and Comrade Aske . . . would not have become involved." He turned a page. "But they did, and when the President gave Project Vengeful to the Prime Minister he also instructed our CIA cousins to give us every dummy3

assistance, as befits their old wartime allies."

"What's comical about that?"

Audley looked up. "What's comical, my dear Paul, is that the first request we made was for them to disinter facts from the year 1812, when we were last at war with each other. And that tickled them no end—in fact, Howard Morris sent me a special SG: 'Have given this Immediate Maximum Effort classification—like Amy Carter's homework'." He shook his head at Mitchell. "What those poor innocent American academics made of Howard's IMAXEF teams arriving on their doorsteps I simply cannot imagine."

Mitchell refused to be drawn further.

"Wilder gave us two lists of names." Audley consulted the folder again. "Living Americans who might be able to tell us about dead ones, as he put it."

Mitchell weakened. "Why Americans?"

"Ah . . . well, he knew you and Aske were in France, because I told him . . . And when he knew that he said I ought to check the American end, just to be on the safe side." He scanned the page under his nose. "I've never heard of any of his live Yankees here, but some of the other names . . . Abraham Timms at the top, naturally . . ."

"Tom Chard?"

"No—no Tom Chard here. But Amos Ratsey, Jas. O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan—aren't they the fellows from Miss Loftus's Vengeful box?"

dummy3

"What about them?"

"Nothing about them—they did unearth a couple of references to a Michael Haggerty, who was an associate of an equivocal Irish American named Jim Burns . . . and there's a Michael Haggerty in the Vengeful list. But it's a common Irish name, and they've got nothing more at all on him than that. Whereas they've got a lot on Abraham Timms ... It seems he became quite a distinguished man in the later post-war period—' self-taught scholar and naturalist; corresponded with Sir Joseph Banks and John James Audubon; issue one son, Thomas Chipperfield Paget Timms, note names' —that's what it says: ' note names' —" he looked at Mitchell "—the names are rather touching, don't you think?

His fellow escapers?"

"Yes." Mitchell frowned. "What did the cousins find out about them?"

"Nothing, I'm afraid. There's only Timms, and Haggerty—

two mentions, associate of the egregious Burns, who was a merchant of some sort, always lobbying Congress to make war with the filthy British—no—no, the really interesting one

—and also the most surprising one—is the one you least expect, which shouldn't be there at all, Paul." Audley looked at him slyly.

"Who?"

"The owner of the Vengeful box, Dr William Willard Pike, no less!" Audley bent over the page. "The CIA liked the sound of him—or, if not the sound, then the smell. . . because it's a dummy3

smell they know, I suspect—even at this length of time—the authentic whiff of the enemy within the gate!"

This time it wasn't a question of not being drawn: it was as though Audley was talking to himself.

"This is pure Howard—pure Howard!" Audley shook his head admiringly. "' There are two schools of thought about Dr Pike, another known associate of Jim Burns (who in our day would have undoubtedly have been wasting our time running hot Armalites across the Canadian border for the IRA to shoot Limeys in Crossmaglen). They both disappeared from the scene here in 1812, never to return, ostensibly to do George III a mischief. But for my money—

and for that of Professor John Kasik, who is nobody's fool—

Pike was a British double-agent, who lit out one jump ahead of Burns with whatever passed for microfilm in those days in his pocket, on the first boat (which was a Portuguese brig bound for Lisbon) with Burns in hot pursuit in a Yankee trader licensed for Plymouth and Antwerp. Kasik and I can't prove anything, but we've both got a "pricking of the thumbs", as you and William S. of Stratford-upon-Avon would say. So forget Timms and check out Burns and Pike.

Ends message'.''

Mitchell had heard of Professor Kasik—had even corresponded with him on an American aspect of Watch by the Liffey, as the best-known living authority on Irish Americans. But that recollection was secondary to his growing sense of unreality over this turn in the conversation.

dummy3

Their interest in the true story of the old Vengeful ought to have ended, yet Audley seemed as enthusiastic about it as ever.

The big man was smiling at him. "We're checking what we can of this in the Bodleian, in FitzGerald's monumental history of the Paddies in America, as well as Kasik's own book. But Howard's chaps probably gained access to a lot of their unpublished material, so our new boy, Phillip Dale—the thin one—is burrowing into the old Foreign Office archives.

If Pike was one of our agents he ought to turn up in association with some of Richard Wellesley's bright boys of the period there. Our very own ancestors, in fact!"

Was it mere academic interest? But it couldn't be that, surely

— surely? Mitchell's brain ached with tiredness.

"If he is ... the Portuguese brig accounts for him being in Lisbon, and he picked up the Vengeful there, while Burns was putting out a general alarm for him. Which, of course, could be why the French eventually became so interested in the Vengeful, eh?"

The Portsmouth Plot, thought Mitchell. If Pike had had information about that which couldn't wait, then that could be why he had trans-shipped to the less-damaged Fortuné after the battle.

It was all supposition—all pictures from a distant planet of a drama enacted long ago, in which the competing actors had been dust and forgotten for generations, mixed with the earth enriched by infinite millions of the long-dead heroes of dummy3

lost causes. But if, when the Last Trump sounded, it was all of immense importance in some ledger of human courage and constancy in adversity, it added up to nothing in the cruel and selfish priorities of now.

"What's the point of all this, David—the object of it?" He hated the question even as he asked it, but it was the only honest question left to him in the extremity of his weariness.

"The point—the object, my dear Paul ... is your Elizabeth—

potentially our Miss Loftus." Audley's voice was gentle, almost sad. "The object and the point is to make your history repeat itself in her . . . through you ... for us—do you see?"

"No. I don't see." A huge disquiet enveloped Mitchell.

"No. Then perhaps this is not the time—"

"This is the bloody time!" Mitchell flogged himself awake.

"What are you up to, David?"

"My duty. Or . . . what I conceive to be my duty." The fatigue showed in Audley too. "They've pissed us around something shocking this time—you and me both, and your Elizabeth—

Latimer has, anyway, to get him out of trouble! So now we must take our profit from it, if we can."

"What profit?"

Audley considered the question. "I want you to go to Hadfields tomorrow—or today, as it is now—to see Elizabeth Loftus. And I want you to chat her up—I want you to be very nice to her ... I want you to offer to finish off her Vengeful book, as you promised you would do in the first place, Paul dummy3

—" A little twitch of pain there: Audley always knew when he was being devious "—you can even take my name in vain, if you have to—but not too much, for safety's sake—"

"Why?"

"Why me? Because she mustn't hate me too much!" The pain became pure. "Why you? Because you're the ideal man for the job—she knows you, and maybe she likes you . . . and I know you like her. And isn't it true that in Lieutenant Chipperfield's day the best press-gangs were always made up of men who'd been press-ganged themselves?"

It was like being swallowed by a boa constrictor: you went in still alive, but in the end the crushing pressures and the stifling digestive juices made you an accepted part of what had swallowed you.

"She's ideal, Paul." Audley willed him to accept the compact.

"It was in my mind that first time I met her, after what you said. What's happened since only confirms it—she's the finest natural recruit I've met since I set eyes on you back in '74—"

the smile mixed pain with happy memory "—in some ways she's maybe even better than you, actually."

The shared memory tore Mitchell back to the British Commonwealth Institute for Military Studies—to the packed shelves of the Great War Documents Room in which he had been researching the West Hampshires' attack on Fontaine-du-Bois, when he had first locked horns with Audley.

But only for an instant, because he knew at last what they dummy3

were both about— dear God, he knew!

"She's perfect," said Audley, sharing the knowledge with his press-ganged press-gang commander. "Independent means and no ties—unmarried, and not likely to be—no inconvenient boy-friends, no nosey relatives—"

Dear God! Audley must once have had a conversation like this with someone about Paul Mitchell—with Colonel Butler maybe, or old Brigadier Stocker or even Sir Frederick Clinton . . . but— history was repeating itself now with Elizabeth Loftus for Paul Mitchell—

No!

"You'll have to go carefully." Audley took his silence for agreement, and stared into space. "You'll need professional advice before you pop the question—"

No! Never mind Paul Mitchell—they must have considered Frances Fitzgibbon like this, once upon a time, and he wasn't having Elizabeth Loftus go the same way— no!

"You look doubtful." Audley had come down out of space a moment too quickly, to catch his expression.

"Yes—" Mitchell choked on the admission.

"Yes. It is a responsibility." Audley nodded understandingly.

dummy3

"But, when you think about it, Paul, recruitment is one of the most important jobs we have—in peacetime." He nodded again. "In wartime, it's easy—we get the cream then. But in peacetime . . ." the nod became a shake of the head ". . . that's when we have to keep our eyes open for natural talent."

A terrible heresy sapped Mitchell's faith: it could be that Audley was right—she was clever, and more than that—she was intuitively quick . . . and more than that— more than that

—she was resolute— she had killed a man!

"But if you'd rather not do it I won't force you. It isn't a job to everyone's taste." Audley looked at him, and then brightened.

"In fact ... I could always ask James Cable as soon as he's free again— he's ex-RN, and the Cables are an old naval family.

She's bound to like him."

Elizabeth would like James Cable—everyone liked James Cable, thought Mitchell miserably. So it wouldn't make a damn of difference if he refused: Audley had it all worked out; and, what was worse, he probably had it worked out right this time, just as he had once done in the case of a certain Paul Mitchell.

Apart from all of which, it was up to Elizabeth to make up her own mind, for better or for worse—it was her right, just as it had once been his, and he had no right to influence her.

Then, suddenly, his own thought echoed in his head: for better or for worse—

"Well? Will you do it?"

dummy3

Mitchell heard the rain beat against the windows. He could see his reflection mirrored in their blackness, distorted by the leading of the diamond panes. It reminded him of his first sight of her, in the mirror at the church fete. She had been scowling in his direction, and he had thought to himself that she was even plainer in the flesh than her picture in the file. But that first glimpse had been just as much a distortion of the true image as his own in the windows.

Audley stretched wearily. "You can sleep on it if you like.

She'll keep for a few more days."

For better or for worse—the idea flowered in Mitchell's brain, opening like the speeded-up film of a natural growth which normally took far longer to mature. For a second it astonished him, it was so far from anything he had thought himself capable of imagining. But then it surprised him that he had not thought of it before, it was so beautifully simple.

"No—" He tried not to smile foolishly "no—"

Merely thinking of it gave him all the rights he needed; if he managed it she would be beyond Audley's reach—and it would serve Audley right for the use he'd made of them both.

"No, I'd like the job, David."

Audley looked pleased. "You think you can win her over, do you?"

That was the big question: she might turn his offer down in favour of Audley's. But then, he didn't need to tell her about Audley's offer at all: The beauty of the thing was that Audley dummy3

was giving him the perfect opportunity to plead his own case, free of interruptions.

"I'll have a damn good try," he said. "You can depend on that, David."

It was a double-cross. But, like they said, love and war were about winning, not fair play.

Document Outline

Local Disk

dummy3