War Game

dummy5

War Game

Anthony Price

I've travelled the world twice over.

Met the famous: saints and sinners,

Poets and artists, kings and queens,

Old stars and hopeful beginners,

I've been where no-one's been before,

Learned secrets from writers and cooks All with one library ticket

To the wonderful world of books.

© JANICE JAMES.

WAR GAME

For Margaret and Brian Aldiss dummy5

From Perfect Occurrences of Parliament and Chief Collections of Letters from the Armie, 9th to 16th May 1645: Friday, May the 9.—I shall this day in the first place present you with a May-game; but such a one as is not usuall, and deserves to be taken notice of, and it is an action of Warre too, and therefore the more sutable to the times.

In Kent the countrey people (no where more) love old customes, and to do every yeer what they have done in others before, and much pastimes, and drinking matches, and May-Poles, and dancing and idle wayes, and sin hath been acted on former May dayes.

Therefore Colonell Blunt considering what course might be taken to prevent so much sin this yeer, did wisely order them, the rather to keep them from giving the Malignants occasion to mutinie by such publique meetings, there having been so many warnings by severall insurrections, without such an opportunity.

Colonell Blunt summoned in two Regiments of his foot Souldiers to appear the last May-Day, May the 1, at Blackheath, to be trained and exercised that day, and the ground was raised, and places provided to pitch in, for the Souldiers to meet in two bodies, which promised the Countrey much content, in some pretty expressions, and dummy5

accordingly their expectations were satisfied.

For on May day when they met, Colonell Blunt divided them into two parts, and the one was as Roundheads, and the other as Cavaliers, who did both of them act their parts exceeding well, and many people, men and women, young and old, were present to see the same.

The Roundheads they carried it on with care and love, temperance and order, and as much gravity as might be, every one party carefull in his action, which was so well performed, that it was much commended.

But the Cavaliers they minded drinking and roaring, and disorder, and would bee still playing with the women, and compasse them in, and quarrell, and were exceedingly disorderly.

And these had severall skirmishes one with the other, and took divers prisoners one from the other, and gave content to the Countrey people, and satisfied them as well as if they had done a maying in another way, which might have occasioned much evill after many wayes as is before declared . . .

(Appendix F from Sir Charles Firth's Cromwell's Army: A History of the English Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford, 1900-1.)

dummy5

Prologue:

The Battle of Swine Brook Field

THE Swine Brook was running red again, with the wounded and dying laid out along its banks under the dappled shadow of the willows.

Mostly they were quiet now, engrossed in the final act of the tragedy which was about to take place in the bright sunshine of the water-meadow where the London pikemen and the wreckage of their brother regiments were huddled, waiting for the last great Royalist assault.

Bathed in sweat under their buff-coats and breastplates, unnerved by the suddenness of the fall of their general, the footmen had nevertheless fought like lions. Twice already they had repelled enemy attacks at push of pike; once—ill-advisedly—they had even tried to follow their retreating attackers up the ridge; galled by the fire of the two sakers up the hillside when their own cannon had fallen silent they had closed up and stood firm, so that the original extent of their line was now marked by their dead to the left and right of them. "Steadfast" had been their field-word and they had lived up to it: now they were about to die by it. The lions had become bullocks waiting for the arrival of the butcher.

The moment had come. The sakers banged out for the last time, the trumpets on the hillside shrilled and were drowned dummy5

by the rising tide of Royalist cheers.

God and the King!

The answering cry from the water-meadow, God our strength, rang hollow. This day God was a Cavalier, and both sides knew it.

Even so, the Parliamentary ranks held firm for one shouting, grunting, groaning minute after the rival pikemen met. Then the lie of the land and superior numbers —and history itself—

overwhelmed them: they broke and ran in panic towards the stream, their fear fed by the knowledge that Thomas, Lord Monson, was notoriously averse to taking Roundhead prisoners. Black Thomas had private scores to settle—a dead brother and a burnt home among them—and this was his day for the reckoning.

Clouds of insects rose from the water as the fugitives splashed through it in the thirty-yard gap between the hawthorn and blackberry tangles; the smoke from their burning wagons thinned, to reveal their abandoned cannon on each side of the rout.

The Royalist infantry surged after them, Monson on his great black horse now leading them. But as he reached the Swine Brook one of his men overtook him—

This was the moment of victory, and also the moment of the act which was to immortalise that victory—and Black Thomas with it—when greater triumphs and commanders would long be forgotten.

dummy5

The soldier tore off his helmet and filled it with the dirty, reddened water. Then he climbed back up the bank and offered it to the Royalist general.

There was a growl of approval from the footmen as Black Thomas lifted up the dripping helmet high for all to see, a growl rising to a great cheer as he lowered it to his lips, the water cascading on either side down his gilded black half-armour.

Black Thomas had promised.

Black Thomas had fulfilled his promise.

"A Monson! A Monson!"

"God and the king!"

The Royalist infantry shook their pikes and waved their swords in triumph; and the watching crowds on the hillside above, who had been waiting for this above all things, took up the applause.

Henry Digby, observing the spectacle from his post beside an old willow ten yards upstream, grunted his disgust. One well-aimed musket ball would have cut Lord Thomas Monson down to size at this moment, and would have gone some way towards avenging the Swine Brook Field slaughter of the righteous. But he had no musket and today there had been no musket ball with Black Thomas's name on it. That day would come, but it was not yet come.

The dead man beside him raised himself on an elbow.

"He's not actually drinking the stuff, is he?" asked the dead dummy5

man.

A dying man who had been dabbing his toes in the water nearby laughed. "I wouldn't put it past him. Just like the real thing—and I'll bet they're all damn thirsty by now." He pointed to Digby's plastic container. "It's not poisonous by any happy chance, is it? But that would be just too much to hope for, I suppose."

"The dye?" Digby shook his head, frowning at the implications of the suggestion. "Of course not. It's strictly non-toxic. But I hope to heaven he doesn't drink it. The stream's full of cow-dung."

"Yrch!" The dead man stared at the stream, wrinkling his nose.

"But they drank it. And he drank it, that's for sure," said the dying man. "And it was probably full of pig-shit then. And it didn't do him any harm."

"I expect they had stronger stomachs than we've got.

Probably had all sorts of natural immunities," said the dead man.

"I doubt that," said Digby. "They were rotten with dysentery at the Standingham Hall siege a week later."

"Both sides were rotten with it," countered the dying man. "I was arguing with a chap from Boxall's Regiment last night in the pub. He said the cavalry was queen of the battlefield, when it came to a killing match. But I reckon squitters was queen. More of the poor bastards crapped themselves to dummy5

death than ever killed each other, for a fact. I had a bad dose of enteritis last summer, and it bloody near killed me, I tell you. And I was full of pills and antibiotics." He nodded wisely. "I should think the safest ingredient in this water back then was probably the blood, and Monson just struck lucky."

As if he had overheard their conversation, the Royalist commander came riding along the bank towards them while his troops surged across the stream in pursuit of the broken Roundheads.

He waved at Digby. "Keep pouring it in, Henry," he shouted.

"We want to make sure it goes all the way down to the road bridge—that's where the crowds will be."

Digby waved back and slopped more dye into the stream. It hadn't occurred to the silly man that it was pointless to waste the dye when everyone was churning up the water, but now most of them were across and he wasn't going to argue the toss. It was enough that he understood better than anyone that his role today, though unglamorous, was probably the most important one of all: just as Black Thomas's unhygienic act had fixed Swine Brook Field firmly in the history books, so that it was remembered by people who'd never heard of such crowning mercies as Naseby and Marston Moor, so today's red stream was what would catch the public eye and the public imagination. The afternoon before, when the other officers had been checking out the battle scenario, he had superintended a dress rehearsal of this bit of it for a BBC TV

dummy5

News crew. By this evening with any luck it would be seen in colour by millions, and from those millions there would be some hundreds of would-be recruits. From them the Mustering Committee would be able to raise half a dozen new regiments—good quality regiments of those who knew what they were fighting about, and loved what they knew.

"How long do we have to lie here?" The dying man consulted a wristwatch. "I'm getting damn thirsty—it comes of watching Black Thomas do his thing."

Good quality regiments were composed of better material than the dying man, thought Digby disapprovingly. Wristwatches were strictly forbidden in battle, together with all other anachronisms except spectacles, and even those had to be National Health steel-framed.

He added more dye to the stream. "5.30 for us." The man hadn't even read his scenario properly. "We have to perform for the crowd first."

He pointed towards the ridge, which was already black with spectators who had been released from the retaining ropes by the crowd marshals.

"Don't worry, Phil," said the dead man. "Any minute now we're due for succour from the Angels of Mercy and consolations from the Men of God."

"You can keep the Men of God—you're dead," said the dying man. "Me, I'll settle for an Angel of Mercy to ease my passing. A little bit of succour is just what I need at the dummy5

moment." He peered around uneasily. "You haven't seen the Lord General anywhere, have you?"

"He's in the next gap," said Digby. "Why d'you want to know?"

"Because he's probably keeping his beady eye on me, that's why. I got chewed up for putting my hand up an Angel's skirt at Overton Moor."

"By the Angel?" asked the dead man innocently.

"Are you kidding? It was my own private Angel. But the Lord General doesn't think a god-fearing man ought to fancy the flesh in his last agonies—he's a stickler for bloody accuracy. . . . There are times when I think I ought to have been a cavalier. They expect that sort of thing, lucky bastards."

Digby was slightly shocked by the dying man's profanity. It was true that Jim Ratcliffe was meticulous in his requirements. But it was also true that it was becoming a point of honour in the Parliamentary Army that there should be no swearing on the field or off it. He had noticed the previous evening that even after the beer had flowed freely and the politics had become vehement there had been very little swearing among the men of his own regiment.

"Are you sure you shouldn't change sides?" He tried to sound casual.

"Change sides?" The dying man repeated the words incredulously. "Christ, man—my old dad was a miner. I've dummy5

voted Labour all my life, and I'm not going to change now. . . . Bloody cavaliers, you won't catch me among them."

"Phil talks like a Malignant," explained the dead man loyally,

"but his heart's in the right place."

"Too true," agreed the dying man. "Just happens Dave and I don't happen to be a couple of your Eastern Association men.

We're low-grade cannon-fodder— what Noll Cromwell called

'old decayed serving-men and tapsters'. We run away when things get too hot, but we bloody well come back again. And we died out there too—" he pointed towards the water-meadow "—before there ever were any Ironsides in their pretty uniforms. This is 1643, remember, not '44 or '45."

He could be right at that, thought Digby penitently. But more than that, there ought to be a use for such cheerful rogues because even in defeat there was a marked reluctance among members of both armies to behave shamefully. The dying man and his friend might become the nucleus of a special group prepared to disgrace themselves—a company of cowards. He might usefully raise the idea with Jim Ratcliffe before the next Mustering Committee meeting. Although he was a successful stockbroker, Jim's enthusiasms for the realism and the Roundhead cause were unbounded.

As he emptied the last of the dye from the canister and reached for a fresh one a shadow fell across his hand.

"Keep it up, Henry—keep it up." Bob Davenport's broad American voice followed the shadow. "It's going down great at the bridge, the people there are loving it. If we could bottle dummy5

it I swear we could sell it for souvenirs. . . . Casualties ready to perform?"

"Any real casualties?" Digby's private nightmare came to the surface.

"Just the usual cuts and bruises . . . plus one minor concussion. No fractures— nothing serious," the American reassured him. "The boys are getting pretty good at looking after themselves."

"Have you seen the Lord General?" asked the dying man.

"Not since he was hit. He's just round the next bush."

Davenport looked over his shoulder. "Well, here they come.

Do your stuff now."

Digby screwed the dripper-top into the new canister of dye and fitted it into the recess he had scooped out in the bank between the roots of the willow. When he had checked that the red stain was spreading satisfactorily he camouflaged the plastic with the grass he had cut in readiness and climbed back up the bank to where Davenport stood beside the bodies. As the first of the spectators drew near he dropped on his knees beside the dying man, his hands clasped in prayer.

"Courage, good friends," said Davenport in a loud voice. "We must needs look upon this dread day as the hand of the Lord raised mightily against us poor sinners, for it was only He that made us fly from the ungodly hosts."

"Amen to that," said Digby. "For those that He loveth He first chastiseth, even as the mighty Samson was brought low dummy5

before the Philistines."

"Ye shall be cast down in this wicked world that ye be raised up in the world everlasting," agreed Davenport. "And doubt not that on the dreadful day of judgment the Lord shall know His own."

"He that loseth his life in Thy service shall save it," said Digby.

"Look! He's all covered in blood, mum," said a shrill treble voice in the crowd.

"Sssh!"

"Tomato sauce, more likely," said another voice irreverently.

There was a titter of laughter, which the dying man cut off with a realistic groan. "Lord, Lord—Thy will be done," he croaked.

"Amen," intoned Davenport.

The bushes on the far side of the stream parted and the first of the Puritan Angels of Mercy appeared exactly on cue, a fine buxom girl bursting out of her tight black dress in unPuritan style.

"Water, water," croaked the dying man.

Raising her skirts with one hand and grasping her leather water-bottle firmly in the other the Angel stepped bravely into the water.

"Thou comest as an angel of mercy, sister," said Davenport.

"This poor fellow hath need of thee."

dummy5

The Angel knelt beside the dying man and tenderly lifted his head as she tilted the bottle to his lips.

The crowd murmured appreciatively, cameras clicked, Digby smelt beer and the dying man winked solemnly at him.

Davenport launched himself into his standard five-minute sermon on the wickedness of the Royalists, the diabolical nature of their recent victory, its temporary nature and the inevitable outcome of their obstinate adherence to Popery, prelacy, superstition, heresy, profaneness and other abominations contrary to sound doctrine, godliness and the will of Parliament.

It was good stirring, authentic-sounding stuff and the American put it over with hellfire sincerity, thought Digby.

Indeed, it knocked spots off all the modern political harangues he had heard, from National Front meetings to International Marxist rallies, at which each side had bayed for the other's blood, but in dull twentieth-century language lacking the marvellous Old Testament vocabulary which had come naturally to seventeenth-century speakers.

Now the climax was coming—

"The Swine Brook runneth red this day with the blood of the servants of the Lord, shed by those men of Belial whose cause is the horridest arbitrariness that was ever exercised in this world." Davenport pointed towards the stream. "It crieth out for vengeance, and be assured that the vengeance of the Lord of Hosts shall be terrible to behold—"

dummy5

Digby rose unobtrusively from his knees (those who were not listening open-mouthed to the American were staring pop-eyed down the Angel's cleavage) and made his way back to the stream's edge to check the spread of the dye.

It was still dripping out nicely from the container, and also spreading—Digby looked down, suddenly perplexed. Where the stream had been stained rusty-brown downstream from the container, now it was also already coloured a vile unnatural pink upstream.

He stared to his left, into the dark tunnel of overhanging bushes. Some unauthorised joker was at work up there, spiking the water with a chemical of his own—possibly a toxic one. And that must be stopped quickly.

The look on his face as he turned back towards the crowd was caught by the dying man.

"What's up, Henry?" he said, reviving himself miraculously.

"Somebody's playing silly buggers," hissed Digby angrily.

"Well, you can't go now—the Preacher's just getting to his blood-and-confusion bit. He'll need you for that."

"This won't wait." Digby pushed into the crowd.

The Preacher paused in mid-flow. Where—" he caught himself just in time. Where goest thou, brother?" he called out.

Digby raised his hand vaguely. "Upon the Lord's business, brother, upon the Lord's business."

He made his way through the crowd and out round the dummy5

straggle of blackberry bushes and young hawthorns to the first gap in the thicket, where Jim Ratcliffe was stationed, carrying with him a gang of small boys who were concerned to discover what the Lord's business entailed. But the gap was empty; without the distraction of the Preacher's performance Jim had obviously spotted the tell-tale stain ahead of him.

Somewhat reassured he continued upstream. The next opening in the undergrowth was nearly a hundred yards on, by a gated farm bridge. That was the most likely place for—

"Mister! Mister!"

The treble yell came from behind him. One of the small boys waved frantically at him, and then pointed at Jim's empty gap.

"'E's in the water, mister!" yelled the boy.

Digby pounded back the way he had come. Inside the gap, between the high tangles of thorn and bramble, there was a yard of ground beyond which the stream widened into a dark little pool.

" 'E's in the water," the voice repeated, from behind him now.

Two slightly larger boys stood on the bank of the stream looking down. One of them squatted down abruptly to get a better view of what lay out of sight.

'Well, I still think 'e's shamming," said the boy who had remained standing. "It's what they do, like on the telly."

Digby noticed a bright splash of red dye on the crushed grass dummy5

beside the boy's left foot.

'Get out of the way," he commanded.

As the boys parted he saw that the pool was bright red.

He took two steps forward and looked down.

One thing Jim Ratcliffe certainly wasn't doing was shamming.

PART 1

How to be a good loser

1

CROMWELLIAN

GOLD HOARD

WORTH "MORE

THAN £2m"

By a Staff Reporter

A subtle skein of historical mystery, interwoven with the red threads of piracy, civil war and sudden death, surrounds the discovery yesterday of a great treasure of gold, thought to be worth more than £2 million, at Standingham Castle in Wiltshire.

dummy5

The discoverer—and the probable owner—of this vast fortune is Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, 26, who inherited the castle recently on the death of his uncle, Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe, 70, after a long illness.

The gold, nearly a ton of it in crudely-cast ingots, is now under guard awaiting the coroner's inquest which must by law decide its ownership.

Meanwhile, Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, who is a Roundhead "officer" in the Double R Society, which re-enacts English Civil War battles and sieges in costume, has revealed how his special knowledge of the period helped him to discover what so many others, Oliver Cromwell among them, have sought down the centuries.

Yet the story that he has finally unravelled begins, it now seems likely, not at Standingham Castle at all, but far out in the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1630, with the disappearance of the Spanish treasure ship Our Lady of the Immaculate Concepcion.

Legend has it that this ship fell prey to one of the last of the Devon sea dogs in the Drake image, Captain Edward Parrott, of Hartland, whose own ship, the Elizabeth of Bideford, was lost that same summer on the North Devon rocks.

It was widely believed in the West Country, however, that Captain Parrott had earlier landed the gold secretly (since England was nominally at peace with Spain at the time), and then had put to sea again.

dummy5

No confirmation of this rumour emerged until August, 1643, when during the Civil War a party of Parliamentary horsemen from North Devon led by Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, the Captain's son, took refuge in Standingham Castle to escape capture by the Royalists.

Colonel Parrott and his men reinforced the defenders of the castle, which had been re-fortified by its owner, Sir Edmund Steyning, himself a fanatical supporter of the Parliamentary cause.

They brought it no luck, however. For after a Roundhead relief force had been defeated at the battle of Swine Brook Field, twelve miles away, the castle was stormed by the Royalists and the majority of its defenders massacred.

Both Colonel Parrott and Sir Edmund were among the dead, but it is known that the Royalist commander, Lord Monson, instituted a thorough—

but fruitless— search of the castle directly afterwards. The historical assumption (though one not widely maintained until now) is that both the search, and indeed Lord Monson's energetic prosecution of the siege, had been inspired by some knowledge of a treasure brought to the castle by the Roundhead horsemen.

The North Devon legend of Spanish gold now became firmly rooted in rural Wiltshire, strengthened by a second search, reputedly by Oliver Cromwell himself, in 1653. Since then there have been at least four other major treasure-hunting operations, the last in 1928 by the late dummy5

Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe's father.

This long record of failure, which led most historians to discount the whole story, has now been ended by Mr. Charles Ratcliffe's brilliant historical detective investigation.

Standing beneath the crenellated outer ramparts yesterday, Mr. Ratcliffe, a youthful and colourful figure, said: "I have never believed the experts who said either that there never was any gold, or that Cromwell must have found it in 1653. As a boy I listened to all the old stories, and I believe that local traditions are worth far more than the half-baked facts in the history books."

Mr. Ratcliffe, who is a postgraduate sociology student and runs a workers' paper in his spare time, said that he had not searched haphazardly for the gold.

"First I studied all the known facts and compared them with the local tales," he said. "Then I simply put myself into Colonel Nathaniel Parrott's shoes.

"I took my final conclusion to a distinguished historian of the period, and he agreed with me.

But I shall tell the full story of that at the coroner's inquest to be held shortly."

And he added intriguingly: "I can say that once I had worked out what really happened I didn't have to search for the gold. I went straight to it."

The only shadow on Mr. Ratcliffe's good fortune is the recent death of his cousin, James Ratcliffe, in dummy5

circumstances peculiarly relevant to—and strangely connected with—the Standingham treasure.

For Mr. James Ratcliffe was killed earlier this year during the re-enactment by the Double R Society (of which he was also a member) of that same battle of Swine Brook Field which preceded the storming of Standingham Castle.

The suspicious circumstances of his death are still being investigated by the Mid-Wessex Police Force, following the adjournment of the inquest in June.

The police have stressed that Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, who was also present on the fatal mock-battlefield, is not involved in their inquiries.

Our legal correspondent writes: It will now be for an inquest jury convened by the local coroner to decide on the ownership of the Standingham gold.

Broadly speaking, buried treasure comes under two categories: that which was deliberately abandoned with no intention of recovery (i.e.

burial goods, like that found in the fabulous Sutton Hoo ship cenotaph), and that which was temporarily hidden by an owner intending to recover it (like the Romano-British coin and plate hoards) or otherwise lost accidentally. The latter category provides the classic examples of

"treasure trove" in which, in default of finding a rightful owner, the established principle of English law is that the Crown is entitled to the treasure but grants "full market value" to the finder. This custom, designed to encourage dummy5

finders to declare their discoveries, has aroused controversy in recent cases where there has been a marked discrepancy between what the Treasury and the British Museum consider "full market value" and what dealers on the open market are prepared to offer, since the finder has no redress in law.

In the case of the Standingham gold, therefore, the sum which Mr. Ratcliffe will receive depends not so much on the value of the gold, which is easily established, as on his ability to establish original ownership to the satisfaction of the coroner's jury.

Audley glanced from the newspaper cutting to his wristwatch. Although they had been cruising along for nearly ten minutes they had somehow contrived to stay quite close to the airport: somewhere just ahead of them a Jumbo was straining to get airborne, engines at full thrust. Like his own worst suspicions.

Naturally they would have known, because they knew him, that he would arrive back from Washington tired and dishevelled and desperate to get back to the loving quiet of his home and family. More, they would have known that he had confidently expected to do just that, because that had been the deal: two weeks of tranquillity at home in deepest Sussex to complete his report (which could be done in less than one) in exchange for a barely endurable month of dummy5

American high summer among old friends who could no longer afford to trust him as they had once done.

And most of all, because of that, they would know that he would be mutinous to the limits of loyalty about taking any new assignment before the present one was discharged.

"Very interesting." He handed back the cutting to Stocker politely.

All of which meant they were very sure of themselves, that had to be the first conclusion.

"Did you read about it in the States?" Stocker inquired with equal politeness.

"There was a story in the Washington Post. I didn't read the British papers in the embassy, they'd only have depressed me."

Stocker delved into his brief-case. "There's another cutting here."

"I don't want to read another cutting. I want to go home."

Audley kept his hands obstinately in his lap. He noticed as he looked down at them to make sure they were obeying orders that his thumbs were tucked into his fists. According to Faith that was a sure sign that he was miserable, uncertain and vulnerable, and consequently in need of special care and protection. And although he mistrusted his wife's instant psychology as much as he enjoyed her interpretation of the duties it imposed on her it was an interesting fact that one couldn't punch anyone on the nose with thumbs in that dummy5

position.

"In due course," said Stocker.

Audley re-arranged his thumbs. Not that punching Stocker would do any good whatsoever; besides, Stocker was quite capable of punching back.

"I've a lot of work to do," he said.

"I know. Your report on the current state of the CIA." Stocker nodded. "Sir Frederick told me."

"Did he also tell you it was for the Joint Chiefs?"

Stocker smiled. "Yes, he told me that too, David."

The Christian name was an olive branch.

"Well, Brigadier—" Audley trampled the olives—"it isn't going to get done by remote control. I intend to write it now, while it's fresh in my mind. Could be it's not without importance."

"I'm sure it is. But this is more important." Stocker lifted the second cutting. "In fact if your time in Washington hadn't run out today we would have brought you back today anyway

—no matter what."

"We?"

"Sir Frederick and I." Stocker paused. "And others."

"Others?"

Any chance of a reply to that question was blotted out by the roar of another big jet. This time the noise was almost unbearable, with the brute force of the sound vibrating the dummy5

car as it slowed down at the entrance to a lay-by on its nearside. There was a police car—a large, vividly-striped Jaguar—parked in the entrance so that there was only just sufficient room for them to squeeze by. The uniformed man at the wheel raised his gloved hand to Stocker's driver, beckoning him on.

It wasn't a custom-built lay-by, Audley realised. Once upon a time, before the runways had swallowed the fields, this had been the line of the main road lurching in a drunken meander between the quiet hedgerows, Chesterton's rolling English road to the life. But when the new highway builders had amputated this unnecessary loop they hadn't bothered to grub up the tarmac, and now the unrestrained hedges had sprouted into trees which screened it from the passing traffic.

But for the jets, it would have been an admirable place for love in the back seat.

But there was no love in this back seat, nor would there be any waiting for him in the back seat of the car parked in the shade of a gnarled crab-apple tree, an anonymous new wedge-shaped Leyland 2200 of the sort he and Faith had contemplated buying in the autumn, in patriotic replacement for his rusting old 1800. In a more peaceful, more honourable world he would be returning to her now.

He waited until the jet thunder had become a distant rumble.

"Others?"

The Joint Chiefs . . . among others. "Uh-huh? You mean Sir Frederick and you and the joint Chiefs . . . and others ... all dummy5

cried my name with one voice in their hour of need?"

"Something like that. Something very like that." Stocker was so sure of himself that he was prepared to be magnanimous.

Audley recognised the tone. Magnanimity was the civilised victor's final body-blow to the defeated.

"I'll bet."

"You should be flattered, David. This is an awkward one, but you have the right equipment for it."

Audley strained to make out the features of the man in the back of the 2200. "I have the right equipment for rape, but I've no intention of letting anyone make a rapist of me, Brigadier."

"That wasn't quite what we had in mind for you." Stocker was almost genial now. "It's your brain we need, not any other part of you. You won't even have to do much leg-work—I've detached Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon to do all that, directly under your orders. And you can have anything else you want within reason, short of the Brigade of Guards." He paused. "If you like you can choose your field co-ordinator too."

Now that was flattering, thought Audley. To be given two bright field operatives who had worked with him before was commonsense. But to be allowed to choose a co-ordinator was patronage on a grand scale.

Unfortunately it was also rather frightening.

"We'll give you Colonel Butler, if you like." Stocker actually dummy5

smiled as he baited the hook with the best co-ordinator in the department. "He's free at the moment."

Audley was saved from not knowing how to react to that by the opening of the 2200's rear door. The mountain was coming to Mahomet.

"It's entirely up to you, anyway," said Stocker mildly, offering the second cutting a second time. "And naturally we're not going to insist on anything. But . . . well, you read this first, David, before you make up your mind."

They weren't going to insist. Audley watched the 2200 as though hypnotised. Of course they weren't going to insist; with his own money and what he could earn—Tom Gracey had as good as promised a fellowship for the asking—he could flounce off in a huff any day of the week.

The pressures were much more subtle than that, though.

The occupant of the 2200 stepped out of the shadow on to the sunlit tarmac.

Of course they weren't going to insist. They didn't have to.

He took the cutting—

A TON OF GOLD FOR RED CHARLIE

Half a lifetime's professional interest in newspapers identified the typography instantly: this was the popular version of the dignified story he had read earlier.

dummy5

Dressed in a flowered shirt and with his long hair curling trendily round his collar, a 26-year-old revolutionary told last night of his amazing discovery of Cromwell's Gold—a whole ton of it.

But Charlie Ratcliffe, who inherited near-derelict Standingham Castle in Wiltshire only six weeks ago, is not yet willing to reveal how he found the treasure which is likely to make him one of the richest men in Britain.

Audley looked up as Stocker opened the car door for the man from the 2200.

"Thank you, Brigadier. No—it's all right. I'll sit here."

The Minister drew open the extra seat from its fastening on the partition which separated them from the driver. "There's plenty of room, I shall be perfectly comfortable . . . Did everything go satisfactorily?"

"Yes, sir. We were in and out in five minutes."

"Good." The Minister turned to Audley. "I must apologise for the unorthodox approach, Dr. Audley. At least you were spared the usual inconveniences. And it was necessary, you understand."

"Of course, Minister." At least the man didn't try to sugar the pill with a diplomatic smile, thought Audley, which saved him from the pettiness of not smiling back. But then this one was the best of the bunch, and more than that a good one by dummy5

any standards; he wouldn't smile in this sort of situation unless he encountered something worth smiling about. "Or let's say I'm beginning to understand."

The Minister stared at him for a moment, as though he had expected a different reply. Then he nodded. "But you were reading one of the cuttings. I think you'd better finish it before we go any further."

Audley stared back into the cool, appraising eyes behind the thick spectacles before lowering his own to the fragment of newsprint. There were times when it wasn't disgraceful to be out-stared, even diminished. In that better—and nonexistent

—world which he had been mourning a minute or two back this man might have been the leader of his party, rather than a senior member of an embattled flank of it. Half his mind struggled with the printed words and the meanings beneath them—

. . . treasure trove inquest shortly to be held.

And in the meantime an inquest of another kind—

of suspected murder— stands adjourned. Its subject is James Ratcliffe, Charlie's cousin . . .

—while the other half grappled with the Minister's presence and the meaning beneath that.

Politics. They were the nightmare grinning on every intelligence chief's pillow; the wild card in the marked pack, the extra dimension in a universe which already had too many dimensions. In his time he had watched the Middle dummy5

East and the Kremlin as he was watching Washington now, and their politics were to him never more than academic matters to be assessed only in terms of his country's profit or loss.

But British politics were different. And so were British politicians, even this man for whom he was already half-inclined to break the golden rule of non-involvement.

. . . however. But country memories are long, and for the price of a pint in the oak-beamed public bar of the Steyning Arms the locals will still tell you the tale of Cromwell's Gold and the bloody siege of Standingham Castle on the hill above—

the gold for which so many treasure hunters have searched in vain . . .

He needed time to think. Time to figure the forces required to bring the Minister to a lay-by behind some bushes at the end of a runway.

But there was no time. He re-read the last three paragraphs as an act of self-discipline before looking up.

The same stare was waiting for him. One reason the Minister was here was to see in the flesh the man who had been selected for a particular job. There was no substitute for that.

"I've heard quite a lot about you, Dr. Audley," said the Minister.

"None of it true, I hope," said Audley.

"Exaggerated, perhaps. Or it may be that you've had more than your share of luck over the years."

dummy5

"I wouldn't deny it. But then . . . wasn't luck the chief qualification Napoleon looked for in his marshals?"

"Yes, it was." The Minister nodded. "But I've always preferred Wellington to Napoleon, myself."

Audley smiled. "As a general, I hope. I seem to remember that he was a deplorable politician."

"True." The smile wasn't returned. "And the moral of that—?"

Audley shrugged. "Good generals usually make indifferent politicians. One should stick to one's profession after the age of forty—I think that I should be just as ... unlucky ... if I became involved in politics at my age, don't you think?"

The Minister regarded him thoughtfully. "Yes, very probably.

In fact neither of us should seek to meddle in the other's —ah

—sphere of activity. If we both agree on the broad principles there's a lot that should be taken on trust, wouldn't you say?"

The oath of allegiance was being put to him more quickly than he had expected, thought Audley. But at least it was phrased in the best feudal spirit, with the acceptance that loyalty was a two-way obligation.

"For example—" the Minister continued smoothly "—

whatever political mistakes the Duke made he did lay down one guiding principle for times of crisis, a rule to which I wholeheartedly subscribe: 'The King's government must be carried on'. I intend to see that it is carried on, and that is why I'm here now."

Audley tried another smile.

dummy5

"I've said something that amuses you?" The Minister frowned.

"No, Minister. I was smiling at myself for jumping to the wrong conclusion for your being here."

"Indeed? Which was—"

"That otherwise I might have gone off to sulk in my tent. I didn't want to go to Washington in the first place—not simply because I don't like to spy on my friends, but because I don't like being buggered about. Because I know why I was sent, in fact."

Stocker gave a warning cough. "David—"

"No, Brigadier. If the Minister has heard quite a lot about me he may as well hear this too. I'm a hard-liner in East-West relations, Minister. I dislike the Russians, and I hate Communists. And with the Helsinki nonsense coming up my face didn't fit at all—I'd become an ancestral voice prophesying war. Or if not war then treachery. So I was banished to the New World with the promise of a fortnight's extra holiday after that, and then a choice of research projects on NATO security. Which promise is about to be broken as thoroughly as any of the undertakings the Soviet government may have appeared to give at Helsinki. And Sir Frederick Clinton knows that that just might have been enough to break the camel's back."

"You're beginning to sound suspiciously like a prima donna, David," said Stocker.

dummy5

"Beginning? Brigadier, I am a prima donna. If you insist on giving me damned difficult arias—like this one—" Audley waved the newspaper cutting "—I've no choice in the matter.

So if you want someone else to sing this, you get whoever you can. But if you want me to sing it, then you damn well have to put up with me, temperament and all." He turned back to the Minister. "So?"

The Minister smiled. "So you'll sing for us?"

"Of course. The Queen's government must be carried on, one way or another. If you're prepared to take me on trust, I'm prepared to take you, Minister. Sir Frederick gave you good advice."

"That you would trust me face-to-face? Obviously he knows you very well."

"Too damn well for my own good. And I know him too."

"He also says that you're good at finding things—that you once recovered a lost treasure for him."

"I've found a number of things for him. And people. But in this case the treasure appears to have been already found. So what exactly do you want me to find?"

"What makes you think we want you to find anything?"

"Well, you surely don't want me to solve a murder for you.

Because solving murders isn't my forte. Murder is for policemen—just as politics is for politicians."

Again the Minister smiled, though more coldly this time.

"Touché, Dr. Audley— I'll try to remember that. But you've dummy5

read the two cuttings: what do you make of them?"

"Textually, you mean? You want a comparison between the two?"

"That would be interesting—for a start."

Audley looked down at the cutting in his hand. Cromwell's Gold—and now Charlie Ratcliffe's gold—was an incomparable "silly season" story for any newspaper by any standards. It was every reader's Walter Mitty dream come true: a ton of gold uncomplicated by taxes and death duties.

Besides such a fortune even the biggest football pools win looked like a lucky afternoon at the bingo hall; but more than that it was a quick fortune won not by luck, but by the sweat of the finder's intelligence, and therefore deserved as no chance fortune could ever be. Only sour grapes would disapprove of Charlie's riches.

Except for one dark suspicion.

"All right . . . Two cuttings, two papers . . . One a heavyweight Sunday, the other a popular Monday." He raised the second cutting. "But the difference goes deeper than that."

"How—deeper?"

"Ratcliffe gave the story to the Sunday. But he didn't give a thing to the daily— there isn't a single first-person quote from him, not a real one. It's all second-hand, or out of their cuttings morgue."

"Inverted revolutionary snobbery, perhaps?"

"Perhaps. But also a mistake."

dummy5

"Why a mistake?"

"Because it never pays to be unfair to the press when you've got a good story. This Ratcliffe—he's not quite as clever as he thinks he is, if that's what he did."

"I'm still not quite with you, Audley."

"Well, it's like this, Minister. He gave the Sunday a splendid story about the discovery of a great treasure, and that's what their story is about. But he gave the daily paper nothing, so they had to dig up the story for themselves—and they dug up a new story. But it's not a treasure story, it's a murder story."

He looked towards Stocker. "What about the rest of the daily press? Did they write about treasure—or murder?"

The Brigadier's expression soured, as though the thought of the British press as a whole was distasteful to him and the only good newspaper was a dead one. Then he nodded.

"Meaning . . . murder?" Audley smiled. Obviously it wasn't quite the moment to admit that some of his best friends were journalists. "Of course they did. That's where the best story is. But if he'd saved a bit for them, or if he'd been fair all round, they might have felt a tiny bit inhibited about putting his skeletons on display so prominently. But he didn't—so they weren't. Of course, as a revolutionary he might have lost either way, but this way he made it a certainty."

He passed the cutting to the Minister. "Read it for yourself.

It's not really about gold, it's about murder. They say that he killed the pair of them, first the son and then the father."

dummy5

"The old man died of cirrhosis," said Stocker.

"A mere detail. He simply anticipated his murder—and that was why Cousin James had to go first. But Charlie wanted the estate, and Charlie got it, that's what it amounts to."

"The estate?" Stocker growled derisively. "The estate is little more than the land on which Standingham Castle stands.

And that—"

"Is near-derelict?" Audley grinned, warming to the task of imagining the extent of Charlie Ratcliffe's villainies. "And no doubt the old man was up to his neck in debt—don't bother to tell me. It's all there between the lines."

"It is?" The Minister looked down at the cutting, then back at Audley. "I must say I don't see it."

"You don't see it, Minister, because you don't need to see it—

you already know it." Audley paused. "The man who wrote that—the reporter, or the re-write man or the sub-editor, or whoever—I hope they pay him what he's worth. There's not a word in it any lawyer could quarrel with. But what it amounts to is that Charlie found the gold, or at least he established to his own satisfaction where it was. Only he didn't want any arguments about ownership—or problems with death duties, either. And if there was doubt about the ownership, then if the father died before the son he might have to face double death duties—which is why the son had to be killed off before cirrhosis got the father. So he killed the son, waited for nature to take its course with the father, and then came up with the goodies. How's that for size?"

dummy5

"Very neat." The Minister stared at Audley thoughtfully.

"And substantially correct?"

The Minister nodded slowly. "Substantially . . . yes, it very probably is. I don't dispute that." He lifted the cutting. "But there's nothing here that says as much. In fact they go out of their way to say that he didn't do it."

"Oh no, they don't." Audley shook his head. "They most carefully don't say that. What they say—or what they very clearly imply—is that he couldn't have done it."

"Very well—couldn't. In this context it amounts to the same thing."

"Not at all. It amounts to the opposite, Minister."

The Minister frowned. "Are you suggesting that 'couldn't'

means 'could'?"

"No. I'm saying that 'couldn't' means did." Audley sat back.

"Not in law, of course. Otherwise the editor would be in trouble now. But we're not a nation of lawyers anyway, Minister. We're a nation of detective story readers."

"So?"

"So we know a perfect crime when we see one—means, motive, but no opportunity. The locked room, the flawless alibi, the unshakeable eye-witness. And Charlie Ratcliffe has seven thousand eye-witnesses to testify that he didn't do it, has he not?"

The Minister nodded again, clearly puzzled. "Yes."

dummy5

"Right. But everyone knows exactly what Hercule Poirot would say to that: 'Here is a man with seven thousand witnesses to his innocence, so my little grey cells tell me that he is the guilty one, mes enfants. Seven thousand witnesses must be wrong.'"

Audley was suddenly aware that he was trying to out-shout a jumbo jet which had stolen up on him and now seemed to be passing ten feet above his head. He noticed also that Stocker was smiling.

The Minister waited until the jet thunder had faded. "So what do your little grey cells tell you?"

It was time to consult his thumbs again, thought Audley.

Stocker's smile had faded with the jet engines, but the memory of it still reverberated. "That I'm in the process of being conned."

"You ... are being conned?" The Minister cocked his head on one side. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Dr. Audley."

"Murder is for policemen, Minister— I've already said so. If you want me to ... pin the rap on Charlie Ratcliffe I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I won't do it."

"Won't?" The Minister's voice was silky.

"Can't."

"You think he's innocent, then?"

"On the contrary. You've already told me he's guilty. I wouldn't dream of disbelieving you, Minister."

"And the seven thousand witnesses?"

dummy5

Audley shook his head. "I don't mean he did it himself—as I'm sure you didn't either. But for one per cent of £2½

million I could put out a contract on anyone you care to name

—or let's say two per cent, inflation being what it is ... No, I'm sure he's guilty. But I'm also sure that I'm not the man to prove it."

"Why not?"

"I've told you. First, it's not my skill. Finding enough proof to convince twelve good men and true isn't something I've ever had to do, I wouldn't know where to start, never mind finish.

"And second, it's a police job. It is their skill—they know how to do it, and they're damn good at it, too. If it can be done, they'll do it—and if they can't do it then I can't do it." He stared hard at the Minister. "And since you're here now I must assume that they can't."

The Minister relaxed, with just the ghost of a smile edging his mouth. "A fair assumption. But you haven't taken your logic quite far enough." The smile grew. "And that is your skill, I gather."

It was an open invitation to go straight to the heart of the matter, thought Audley. But for some reason the Minister was unwilling to spell it out, but wanted Audley himself to deduce it.

He stared out of the car window at the crab-apple tree in the hedgerow. There was a crab like that in the spinney behind his own kitchen garden wall at home, and like this one it was dummy5

laden with fruit. The late frost and the bullfinches had played havoc with his carefully tended Blenheims and Cox's Orange Pippins, but the devil himself looked after the crab-apples.

And if what the Minister said was true then it looked as if the devil had kept a friendly eye on Charlie Ratcliffe too.

So they were morally certain that Charlie Ratcliffe was the killer, or at least the killer's paymaster, but they couldn't prove it. But that had happened before and would happen again: there were some you won and some you lost, and there was no use weeping about it. Those were the ones you notched up to experience, hoping that the Lord of the Old Testament would keep His promise about repayment in His own time.

But Ministers of the Crown had no time to worry about such things in any case. Murderers caught and murderers free could only be statistics to them. All murderers were equal before the law.

Even revolutionary murderers.

Audley looked back at the Minister as innocently as he could.

"Tell me about Charlie Ratcliffe, Minister. I'm afraid I'm not very well up in revolution at the moment."

Stocker fished a yellow folder out of his brief-case. "Charlie Ratcliffe, David," he said.

Audley accepted the folder. It was crisp and new, like the typescript within it.

Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe.

dummy5

Interesting, that. Despite battle and murder, and Puritan revolutions and Royalist restoration, and Protestant revolution and Hanoverian succession, and industrial revolution and democratic succession, and the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars and the rise and fall of the Labour Party and Trades Union succession . . . despite all that there was still a Steyning in possession of Standingham Castle after over three centuries of accelerating social change.

They must be a shrewd, tough line, the Steynings.

The Steyning-Ratcliffes.

Charlie Ratcliffe.

He felt the smooth, thick paper under his fingers. That was interesting too—if anything even more interesting. Not Department paper and not a departmental typewriter. Not a photocopy from the Special Records or a typist's copy of a print-out from the Central Computer. But, for a bet, if he now called for a photocopy on a print-out from anywhere else, then this would be what he would get.

Well, they had been careless—

Born April 23, 1949—

A mere baby, relatively speaking.

—careless. Which was all the more reason why he must not be careless in his turn and ask them the direct question that was on the tip of his tongue: what had there been in the original file on Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe that wasn't dummy5

fit for David Audley's eyes?

Much better to hold on to that question. So long as it remained unanswered there would be an area of uncertainty.

But there were ways and means of dealing with that, and as long as it remained officially unasked he had a nice little excuse with which to account for future failure.

Educated at—

He read the typed pages through carefully. Until the last one they contained nothing of unique, or even very special, interest; Charlie Ratcliffe was no different from his fellow activists among the privileged youth of the West, from the Berlin Wall to the Golden Gate, the product and victim of his age.

Born a century earlier he might have carried the flag or the Gospel into darkest Africa. Born fifty years later—or twenty-five years after that—he might just have managed to get his name on the village war memorial, with the lost generations of First World War subalterns and Second World War bomber crews.

But Born April 23, 1949 he had become the founder and editor of The Red Rat, which appeared to advocate an odd mixture of perfect peace and bloody revolution, in which all men not hanging from lamp-posts were brothers.

"Well . . ." he closed the folder and met the Minister's stare again "... I would have thought you'd have done better to enlist a good team of sharp lawyers rather than me, dummy5

Minister."

"Why lawyers?"

"You don't want young Charlie to get his hands on his ton of gold. And the easiest way to do that would be to prove it isn't his."

The Minister nodded. "And how would we do that, Dr.

Audley?"

Audley shrugged. "I'm not a lawyer. But . . ."

"But?"

"Well, I would think you could make a damn good case that it belongs to the Crown, for a start."

"How do you make that out?"

Audley thought for a moment, imposing the facts on the first cutting's interpretation of the treasure laws. "Okay. Charlie found it, and he found it on his own land —correct?"

"Correct."

"So if it had been lost then he gets the full market value—

right?"

"Yes."

"Uh-huh. But it certainly wasn't lost— as if anyone could lose a ton of gold on dry land. It was hidden by—" Audley stopped abruptly.

"By Colonel Nathaniel Parrott," said Stocker.

Audley stared from one to the other of them. It just couldn't be as easy as this, with Stocker and the Minister listening dummy5

politely and answering politely, and helping him out every time he stumbled. Because if there was one thing the Minister and the Department had at their beck and call it was a complement of sharp Government lawyers.

"Go on, Dr. Audley," said the Minister.

Audley shook his head. "There's no point. If you could take it away from Ratcliffe legally then you wouldn't be here now.

Which means that somehow he's got you by the short hairs."

The two men exchanged looks. Then the Minister nodded.

"Yes . . . well, you're substantially correct on both counts, I must admit. We would prefer not to see a fortune pass into Charlie Ratcliffe's hands, for reasons which don't concern you directly . . . And we naturally did look very closely into the legal possibilities. In fact it was the first thing we considered."

And that figured, thought Audley with a twinge of personal bitterness. When it came to separating people from their money by fair means or foul, Her Majesty's Civil Service had nothing to learn from the Great Train Robbers.

"We even contemplated encouraging the Spanish Government to raise the issue of original ownership." The Minister's nose wrinkled with instinctive distaste.

"You mean—Parrott's ownership? Back in the seventeenth century?"

"That's right." The distaste was masked now. "But there are certain—ah—legal difficulties in that area."

dummy5

Not to mention political ones, thought Audley. To sup at that Spanish table any British politician would require a very long spoon, and a social democrat like this man would never be able to find a spoon long enough for safety.

"In any case there seems to be little doubt that Parrott was the owner, in fact and in law, by inheritance from his father,"

the Minister continued. "And that he hid it, intending to recover it later. That presumption is overwhelming."

"It could have been the other fellow who hid it—Steyning."

"It makes no difference. Parrott was the owner. And the moment he was dead it belonged to his heir."

His heir. That was the point, of course; all that flummery from "our legal correspondent" about treasure troves and fine points of English law paled into nothing if there was an heir.

Because then a much older and stronger law could be invoked: that it was someone's property, protected even in this semi-socialist society by the most sacred laws. Only in Charlie Ratcliffe's own revolutionary Utopia, where all property was theft, could there be any argument about that.

Which was an irony because—

"His heirs," said the Minister. "And their heirs, Dr. Audley."

Audley had reached the same point of repetition as he spoke, but he still stared across the car incredulously. After three hundred years—after three hundred years, then this was a coincidence which overshadowed that irony as a skyscraper dummy5

did a mudhut.

"Minister—are you telling me that Charlie Ratcliffe is Nathaniel Parrott's heir?"

"I am indeed."

"As well as the Steyning heir?"

"Is that so incredible to you?"

"It's one hell of a coincidence."

The Minister shook his head. "Not really. The Parrotts and the Steynings were related and they had a common heir who married a Ratcliffe, that's all. Unfortunately for us there isn't a shadow of doubt about the descent either; because although the Ratcliffes have managed to lose practically every acre they inherited, with the sole exception of the land on which Standingham Castle stands, they've never failed to produce a male heir, right down to Charles Neville, who is literally the last of the line. With no pretenders and no rival claimants."

No pretenders and no claimants—and no arguments, thought Audley. Charlie Ratcliffe could hardly be better placed if he had struck oil, not gold: he himself, unaided, had found his own property on his own land.

"The last of the Ratcliffes," repeated the Minister, "and now the richest. And consequently the most dangerous." He lifted his hand to adjust his horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose.

"And there is apparently absolutely nothing we can do about it. As things stand the coroner's inquest will be a mere dummy5

formality, so it seems. And that's just two weeks from today."

Audley looked very carefully from one serious face to the other. If what the Minister had said was true, literally true, he knew exactly what the Minister meant.

Only in England ... in Britain . . . here was a Minister of the Crown, holding one of the most powerful posts in the Government, and a very senior Civil Servant, one of the most senior officers of the security service, explaining to him the niceties of a three-hundred-year-old inheritance and their inability to control its fate.

There is absolutely nothing we can do about it and we're running out of time.

It could only happen in Britain. Or maybe in the United States, for all the scandals of recent years (perhaps even because of them!). And, to be absolutely fair, perhaps still in one or two of the other Western democracies. . . .

Only in the West, then—the West which Charlie and his kind hated and despised—only there would Charlie and his inheritance present any problem whatsoever. Elsewhere another minister would only have to nod, and another civil servant would take the nod and pass it down the line to someone whose job it was to translate ministerial nods into executive actions for the Good of the State.

But not this Minister, not this Civil Servant. Nor this State, thank God!

And the proof of that, if any proof beyond his own judgement dummy5

was needed, was that they would never have come to him to get their problem solved. He was even less skilled at committing murders than he was at solving them.

So what the devil did they want, then?

"Dr. Audley." The Minister's voice was sharp suddenly.

"Minister?" Audley realised he had been looking clear through the Minister.

"If you're thinking what you may be thinking, then don't.

There's to be no killing."

"Sir—" Stocker bristled defensively.

"It's all right, Brigadier." Stocker's reaction defused Audley's anger before it had had time to spark. "You do yourself an injustice as well as us, Minister. So perhaps we'd better get back to your problem . . . and I would have thought the law was still your best bet there. Better than me, anyway."

The Minister sat in silence for a moment, as though slightly confused by the reactions he had stirred. "The law?"

"The law's delay, more accurately. There has to be a fuzzy edge to it somewhere—enough to hold things up, anyway. If you want to stop Ratcliffe getting his hands on ready cash ...

Is that the object of the operation?"

"It is, yes."

"And do I get to know why?"

The Minister shook his head slowly. "You don't need to know that, Dr. Audley. Let's just say Ratcliffe can cause all kinds of dummy5

trouble with it on a scale we can't handle at this moment."

"Then I would have thought someone would have already supplied him with the necessary funds."

"But everyone would have known where they came from then. And that would have compromised him totally." The head went on shaking slowly. "The whole trouble with this money is that it's . . . shall we say, respectable?"

Point taken. In revolutionary circles Russian gold and Chinese gold—even at a pinch Libyan gold—was tainted. But Cromwell's gold had been purified by three hundred years in the ground.

"I see. . . ." Audley pursed his lips. "Well, in that case I'd let the Spaniards contest it. You don't need to give it to them—

you can argue against them publicly. But you can use them to delay the pay-out."

"Of course we can. But you're forgetting your basic economics; we can delay the pay-out in a hundred and one ways, nothing easier. What we can't affect is the credit. And at this moment Charlie's credit is as solid as a rock in the City. In fact he's already negotiating a big loan at a very reasonable rate of interest."

"That's where we need you, for a start," said Stocker. "We can hit his interest rate even if we can't do anything else.

Through you."

"Through me? How?"

The Minister smiled. "In certain restricted circles you have a dummy5

reputation, Dr. Audley."

"Restricted—?" Audley stared at Stocker, aghast.

"Very restricted, naturally," continued the Minister soothingly. "We wouldn't be shouting your name from the rooftops. It would be more in the nature of ... dropping the word in the right place—that we aren't satisfied with the situation as it is . . . and that we are doing something about it."

"Dropping my name, you mean."

"Only in the first instance. And only at the very top, of course . . . where you have a reputation, as I've already said."

"A reputation for what?" Audley was again appalled and flattered at the same time, as well as being intensely curious.

To have a fame that could go before one like the rumble of thunder before the storm was gratifying, even if the sound could only be heard by a few; but to risk losing the element of surprise was a very high price to pay for that gratification.

"For what ..." The Minister looked to Stocker for aid.

"You make things happen," said Stocker brutally.

"And that is exactly what we want. Dr. Audley." The Minister adjusted his spectacles again. "In the matter of Charlie Ratcliffe's gold, we want something to happen. And we want it very urgently."

2

dummy5

AUDLEY drove westwards at his own speed, which was slow, and by his own route, which was by every small country road he could follow without too much difficulty. If he was late they would just have to wait for him.

As he drove he reviewed his predicament, and decided he didn't much care for it. He had a high regard for the efficiency of the police, but if Charlie Ratcliffe had bought himself a pro from London, or even from abroad, then they had never had a proper chance. And on a cold trail he himself stood no chance at all.

A cold trail which had suddenly become important. Well, at least he could understand the urgency of it: once that inquest jury had pronounced its verdict there was nothing anyone could do to stop Charlie Ratcliffe doing whatever it was they feared he would do. And maybe the Minister himself was his next target.

But that wasn't the real maggot in the apple, just a small bruise on the outer skin of it. The maggot was politics.

The Department never involved itself in internal politics, and no matter how much the Establishment feared Ratcliffe's ability to make a nuisance of himself with a ton of gold in his war chest, that still wasn't the Department's business—it was just the Establishment's bad luck. So someone very heavy must have leaned very hard on the Department—especially after what had happened with Nixon and the CIA.

Which could mean one of two things.

dummy5

Either—Yes, this is an interesting assignment. So we'll bring our best man back from Washington . . . David Audley.

Brilliant mind, remarkable record, blah, blah, blah. . . .

Or—Yes, this is a bastard job—if it goes wrong there'll be hell to pay, and the odds are it will go wrong. So who's expendable in the awkward squad at the moment—

There was a cowman in the road ahead, bright in his orange-banded safety jacket, motioning him to stop and give way for a milking herd on their way to the byre. He had noted the Cattle Crossing sign fifty yards back, and the tenth of his brain which read the signs had already lifted his foot off the accelerator.

If that was the case—

The first of a stately procession of beautiful fawn-coloured Jerseys nosed her way out of the gate on the cowman's left.

If that was the case it would be immensely satisfying to give the Minister what he wanted. But it would be much more prudent to aim at an attainable target.

Respectable failure?

No, that would be beneath his honour. He had promised the Minister, and that promise was binding. But he had not promised the Minister he would risk his neck and his career—

as he would have done if the enemy had been a foreign one and not a dirty little jackal who cracked the bones of politicians' indiscretions to get at the scandalous marrow dummy5

within.

Not failure, then. But he wouldn't aim at a total victory; he would fight a limited war strictly within the Geneva Convention, dropping no bombs beyond the Yalu and keeping his gloves on all the time. The Minister himself had spelt out the rules after all, so that was fair enough.

The leading Jersey nodded at him in agreement across the bonnet. That was decided then. For once he would behave himself, and, if he resolved that from the outset, he ought to be able to organise the mission without any scandalous incidents.

All he had to do was to operate in a regulation manner, using as many operatives and as much equipment as they would let him have. These could be deployed in complicated operations, while he himself was engaged in exhaustive researches into —into what?

The Jerseys were pouring out now, stepping daintily with their forefeet, but lurching boney hindquarters and distended milk-bags behind them as though their rear halves had been added on from some different and much more ungainly animal.

Into the seventeenth century, of course! Into the Civil War, and the Gold of Standingham Castle—and even into the Double R Society itself. He ought to be able to lose himself safely in all of those without offending anybody very much.

Meanwhile others could research into Charlie Ratcliffe and dummy5

The Red Rat.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the Rat looked like. He had only seen the thing once, together with a report of an investigation into the charge that the underground and semi-underground press was being funded by external subversive organisations.

Which, apparently, it wasn't . . . And all he could really remember was the origin of its title, which had derived not so much from Charlie's own name as from an insult hurled at him during some political rally —You bloody little Commie rat!

Which Charlie, in the best political tradition, had seized on and gloried in—If I'm a rat, then the plague I carry is death to the oppressors of the workers!

Good rousing stuff, that. Much better than the smudgy, crudely-printed character-assassination sheet packed with half-truths, innuendoes and near-libels which had taken its name from that violent occasion.

Audley opened his eyes and smiled at a doe-eyed heifer which had thrust her dripping black nose at him through the window of the car. The rich sweet smell of cow was infinitely preferable to the sour smell of hate and envy that rose from The Red Rat's pages.

All the same. The Red Rat had had a clean bill of health. For all that it occasionally came up with an uncomfortably genuine morsel of scandal—which it usually ruined with dummy5

crass exaggeration— there had been no hint of foreign manipulation, KGB or other. The only string to it was the shoestring on which it ran: it had almost certainly avoided the legal consequences of its most outrageous accusations because it wasn't worth taking to court, not because of the victims' generosity.

Now it would have to tread more carefully. But now it could also afford to tread more heavily.

He drove on steadily, stopping first to purchase a bottle of beer and a pie, and then to turn two pound notes into small change.

The Jerseys had relaxed the last of his Atlantic tensions, the Jerseys and the quiet of the countryside, the green and yellow countryside of the last days of harvest time.

There hadn't been so much stubble-burning this year, he noted approvingly. But what was saddening was the epidemic spread of Dutch elm disease which was browning the leaves everywhere with a false autumn. It looked as though the day of the elm was over in southern England, his own elms among them.

He realised he was seeing all around him what he wanted to see, not what should be uppermost in his mind. The countryman was seeing the fields and the trees, just as the property developer would see choice building land, and the psephologist would pass from one parliamentary division to dummy5

the next, remembering each one's electoral swing.

What he should be seeing now was not the peaceful countryside of the 1970s, but the war-torn land of the 1640s, the divided England of the last great English Civil War.

Except that was easier said than done, because for all his degree in history there wasn't a great deal he could recall about the seventeenth century—

King versus Parliament.

Cavaliers versus Roundheads.

Dashing Prince Rupert versus dour Oliver Cromwell.

Cavaliers—wrong, but romantic.

Roundheads—right, but repulsive.

And, of course, the Roundheads had won, and dear old Sir Jacob Astley, surrendering the last Royalist army, had summed up this and all other wars—You have now done your work and may go play; unless you fall out amongst yourselves. . . .

Which the victorious Roundheads had promptly done.

Because now, in place of the King and his cavaliers, they had Cromwell and the terrible New Model Army which had won the war—the unbeatable Ironsides who knew what they were fighting for (more or less), and loved what they knew.

It was coming back, thought Audley. Some of it, anyway.

dummy5

And then Cromwell had ruled England with his New Model sword, and a great many people had felt the edge of it—the Scots and the Irish and the new young King Charles II ... and the Dutch and the Spaniards, and even the Algerine pirates, by God!

And the English themselves most of all, and they hadn't liked that very much—

In the name of Lucifer, Amen; Noll Cromwell, Lord Chief Governor of Ireland, Grand Plotter and Contriver of all Mischiefs in England, Lord of Misrule, Knight of the Order of Regicides, Thieftenant-General of the Rebels, Duke of Devilishness, Ensign of Evil, being most wickedly disposed of mind— they hadn't liked it at all, having a man who made the trains run on time, and solved the parking problem, and evened the balance of payments by throwing a sword on to the scales.

Yes, it was coming back, but he needed much more precise information than this before he could decide what to do.

He assembled his small change in neat piles and dialled the London number of the ancient banking house of Fattorini.

"David Audley for Matthew Fattorini, please."

"Will you hold the line please, Mr. Audley." Polite voice, polite pause for checking Matthew's personal list. "I'm putting you through now, Dr Audley."

dummy5

A shorter pause—"Hello, David! I thought you were in Washington."

"You know too much, Matthew. I was, but now I'm not . . .

And I need to pick your brains."

"Pick away, dear man—brains, pockets, it's all the same—

empty."

Since Matthew Fattorini was certainly one of the shrewdest men in London, and would be one of the richest there before he retired, that was a mild departure from the truth, thought Audley.

"Gold, Matthew."

"Uh-huh. Buying or selling?"

"Neither."

"Pity. Lovely stuff, gold. Price is just about to go down, too."

"I want information, Matthew."

"Don't we all, dear man! But if you want to know whether the Portuguese are going to sell some more of their reserves —

and they've got at least 800 tons still— or how much the Russians are going to sell for that US grain, you've come to the wrong man—sorry."

"Not that sort of information. Historical information."

Silence. Audley fed the coin box again.

"What sort of history, David?"

"Sixteenth, seventeenth century."

Another moment of silence. "Wouldn't be Cromwell's gold by dummy5

any chance, would it, David?"

Audley grinned into the mouthpiece. "I told you, you know too much, Matthew."

"Read the papers, that's all. Lots of interesting things in the papers—you should know, you spend most of your time keeping the best stories out of 'em. But still lots of interesting things. Some of 'em very nearly true, too."

"Like a ton of gold? Can that be on the level, Matthew?"

"Why not, David? Ton of gold weighs the same as a ton of wheat. It's just worth more—and easier to move, that's all."

"Did they ship that sort of cargo from America?"

"In the seventeenth century? Dear man, that was the main cargo from the Spanish American colonies for years—gold and silver, plus gems and spices. I know for a fact that California was producing up to eighty tons a year in the 1850s, and Australia even more. If you think of all the gold-producing areas in the Americas— well, Francis Drake picked up tons of the stuff, gold and silver, in that one raid of his in the 1570s. And that must have been all from the current year's ore, they wouldn't have left the previous year's production just lying around, would they now?"

"But in one shipment, Matthew?"

"You mean all their eggs in one basket? Yes, I see. ..."

"And with pirates and bad weather—"

"Ah—now you're being deceived by your own historical propaganda. The English—and the French and the Dutch too dummy5

—always dreamed of Spanish treasure ships, but they very rarely captured one. They travelled in convoy, for a start. And there were very few men of Drake's calibre . . . which was of course why the Spaniards made such a fuss about him.

Besides, this shipment of yours was much later—in the 1620s or 30s, if I remember right, wasn't it? That is the one we're talking about, I presume?"

The mixture of disinterested interest and casual helpfulness was almost perfectly compounded, thought Audley.

"You wouldn't have a personal interest in Charlie Ratcliffe's credit, would you, Matthew?"

"Hah! Now who knows too much for his own good, eh?"

Matthew chuckled briefly. "But as it happens—no. I'm not a crude money-lender. And if I was . . . there are some people I wouldn't lend money to."

"But there are people who might?"

"If they thought the profit and the risk matched up—I know of one such." There was an edge to Matthew's tone. "Though now you're showing such a laudable interest in Spanish-American economic history, am I entitled to hope that he's going to be in trouble?"

"You're not entitled to hope for anything, Matthew."

"Pity. But what you really need is an expert historian, my friend."

"I know. I suppose you don't happen to have one in your counting-house, do you?"

dummy5

"Not bloody likely. But I can give you a name." Matthew chuckled again. "You won't like it though, I tell you."

"Why not?"

"Why not? Hah—well you remember that long streak of wind-and-piss on our staircase at Cambridge—the one who got a First despite everything his tutor could do? The one who read The Times aloud at breakfast?"

"Nayler?"

"Professor Stephen Nayler to you, you hireling. He's transmogrified himself into a Fellow of St. Martin's, and he's also by way of being a television pundit on matters historical for the BBC. But I expect you've seen him on the box, haven't you? Or do you just watch the rugger and Tom and Jerry?"

"What's Nayler got to do with Charlie Ratcliffe's gold, Matthew?"

"Why—everything, dear man. The blighter's going to do a programme of some sort on it. A sort of on-the-spot re-enactment, complete with young Charlie dressed up as his revolting ancestor. ... So if you go crawling cap in hand to the great man himself he'll surely help you."

"I should very much doubt it. We never got on with each other."

"Got on? Dear man, he hated your guts —you were the ghastly rugger-playing hearty who nearly pipped him for the senior scholarship. And that's precisely why he'll help you, if you abase yourself suitably. Where's your psychology?"

dummy5

Matthew Fattorini clucked to himself. "No, he won't be your problem. . . . It's young Charlie you want to watch out for."

"Indeed?" If Matthew was fishing, this was one time he'd find nothing on the hook.

"Indeed and indeed." Fattorini gave a grunt. "Oh, yes—I know what you're thinking: you play with the big rough boys, and he's just a juvenile revolutionary. But I mean it all the same, David."

"You know him?"

"Never met him in my life. But I know he's a man with a lot of gold."

"Gold—meaning power?"

"Not just power. Gold changes people, believe me."

"You should know, Matthew."

"I do." Fattorini's voice was serious. "But my gold is all on paper. Ratcliffe's is the real thing, and it's all his. And what's even more to the point is he's handled it —a lot of it. They say you're never the same after that, it turns little pussycats into tigers. Remember Bogart in 'Sierra Madre'? Don't you forget that, David...."

Audley picked up the remains of his money and walked back to collect the beer and the pie, his reward for being right about Matthew Fattorini's usefulness.

He sat on the grass, swigged the beer, munched the pie and dummy5

thought about how much Matthew must dislike the anonymous source of Charlie's present credit. That in itself was interesting.

But Nayler was something different. All he could remember was a spotty face, uncombed hair and a long, lanky body.

Plus, of course, the voice which had driven Matthew and himself from the breakfast table all those years ago. But if he'd got that senior scholarship he could hardly be stupid, anyway.

He swallowed the last fragment of pie, washing it down with the last draught of beer, and sighed deeply. It had been a bonus that Matthew had known as much as he did, confirming the Brigadier's information about the fund-raising. And Matthew had even produced the right reaction at his interest in the subject. But in the meantime, here and now and in the sacred name of duty, he was going to have to undertake some cap-in-hand crawling.

He retraced his steps unwillingly to the phone box, piled up his coins again, and obtained Nayler's college number from directory inquiries.

There was always hope that the man was out. Or even that he wasn't up at all, since term had nowhere near started, and every self-respecting don would be away from college until it did. Or even that he was happily and fruitfully married, and was taking his wife and his seven ugly and precocious daughters to Bournemouth for a prolonged summer holiday.

Then he could honourably get someone else to do this job.

dummy5

But he knew even before the Porter's Lodge answered that it wouldn't be so. All the laws of chance decreed that anything anyone didn't want to happen as much as that had to happen, no matter what the mathematical odds against.

"What name shall I give, sir?" inquired the Porter politely.

"Audley. David Audley." Audley closed his eyes. "We were ...

up ... together many years ago, you might remind him."

And there wasn't the slightest possibility that Nayler wouldn't help him. Plus not the smallest fraction of that slightest possibility that he wouldn't settle a few old scores in doing so.

"Hullo?" The voice set Audley's teeth on edge. "Hullo there?"

"Professor Nayler?" Audley opened his eyes to glare at the dying elms. "This is David Audley. Do you remember me?"

"But of course! How are you, my dear fellow? Flourishing, I hope."

The machine asked for more money.

"Well enough." Audley swallowed.

"Jolly good." The words were qualified with an audible sniff.

"What is it that you're doing now—teaching is it?" Nayler managed to make teaching sound like sewing mailbags.

"No." That was all he could manage. But he had to do better than that, for the Minister's sake if not for his own.

"No? But you did publish a little book not so long ago, didn't you? I seem to recall seeing it mentioned somewhere."

dummy5

The scale of the insult had a steadying effect. It was on a par with reading The Times aloud at breakfast.

"Yes. But I work for the Treasury now." That was safe. But more to the point, it was also sufficiently impressive.

"The Treasury?" Nayler sounded disappointed. "Jolly good. ... So what can I do for you, then?"

"We're working on the Standingham Castle gold hoard—you may have read about it in the press?"

"The Standingham Castle hoard?" Nayler was elaborately casual. If Matthew was right he must have all the facts to hand by now, but he wasn't going to admit prior knowledge of the question.

Audley felt better now, even a little ashamed that he had ever let his temper rise; in such circumstances as these flattery did not belittle the flatterer, only the flattered.

"We're looking for an expert to confirm some of the historical facts. Naturally, your name was the first one to come up, Professor."

Nayler bowed to him over the phone. "What is it you want to know?"

"Just the broad details. Did the Spaniards really lose a major shipment of gold at that time?"

"Yes, they did. There's a newsletter from the Fuggers'

Antwerp agent reporting it overdue."

"All that gold in one ship?"

dummy5

"Yes . . . well, that was due to a series of unfortunate accidents. The treasure fleet put into Havana en route from the mainland ports—Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello and so on. But two of them had been damaged in a storm, and they transhipped their gold into the Concepcion and the San Salvador. And then, during the second storm in the Atlantic, when the fleet was scattered, the San Salvador sprang a bad leak and they transhipped again when the weather moderated. So the Concepcion was carrying a quite exceptional cargo when the third storm broke."

"And then they were scattered again?"

"That's correct. But the San Salvador made port and the Concepcion didn't— that was how the first news of the loss reached Europe."

"I see. Whereas in fact old man Parrott scooped it up for himself?"

"That was the legend in North Devon, certainly. It was never substantiated, of course."

"You mean, they took a treasure ship with a ton of gold—and nobody blabbed?"

"Ah—no, Audley. It wasn't quite like that. The story was that Edward Parrott landed the gold secretly at Shipload Bay, because England was at peace with Spain and what he'd done was the blackest piracy and couldn't possibly be publicly admitted. And then he stood out to sea again and made for Bideford—the Elizabeth of Bideford was his ship. But then dummy5

the storm caught him—"

"Another storm?"

"They called that year 'the Year of Storms', Audley. The fourth one that summer took six ships between Padstow and Hartland Point—including the Elizabeth of Bideford on the rocks of Morwenstow. Only three of her crew made the shore and lived."

"Including Edward Parrott, I take it?"

"Including Edward Parrott. And none of them talked."

"Then how did the legend start?"

"I said three got ashore and lived. There was a fourth who came ashore farther down the coast, a very young boy. The local story was that he babbled of a great treasure of Spanish gold before he died."

"Hmm. . . . Not only the local story but the old, old story. No wonder no one believed it later on—'the dying survivor babbling of treasure' would have been the kiss of death to it."

"But in this instance it was the truth, Audley."

It looked as though Professor Nayler belonged to the wise-after-the-event brigade.

"It certainly looks that way, I agree."

"I should think so. The idea that this young man—what's his name . . . Ratcliffe—could rob Fort Knox does seem a somewhat quaint conceit, if I may say so. But then I suppose you Treasury people have to leave no stone unturned, eh?"

dummy5

Audley wondered idly for a moment how his opposite number in the KGB would have conducted this inquiry, then thrust the thought out of his mind. That way lay sinful and very dangerous heresies.

"We're rather more interested in establishing why the—ah—

young man was so sure the gold existed. After all, the experts said it didn't."

"Oh no, not all the experts, Audley. No indeed!" Modest pause for the shaking of distinguished head. "I've long had my suspicions about that little episode. “

"You thought the gold did exist?

"I thought there was a strong possibility." Nayler was hedging slightly now. "Of course there was no direct evidence, of course. As things stood it was—ah—a mere footnote. Or not even that, really."

Message received: if Nayler had really believed as much, which was bloody doubtful, he hadn't been willing to commit himself in print as saying so. But no matter—

"No direct evidence? Meaning there was indirect evidence?"

"Circumstantial evidence Or shall we say inferential evidence?"

We could say what we liked as long as we said something useful, thought Audley tightly. "Apart from the timing of the disappearance of the Conception and the wreck of the Elizabeth?"

"Oh yes, indeed. I shall be saying as much on the television dummy5

shortly, on their 'Testimony of the Spade' programme— BBC

2, of course."

Of course. No vulgar commercials there —except for Professor Nayler.

"Indeed? Well, you wouldn't care to give me a brief preview? I

—and the Treasury—would be in your debt then, Professor.

For our ears only, as it were?" Uriah Keep couldn't do better than that, by God!

"I don't see why not. It's really quite simple when you know how to interpret the facts. . . . You see, Audley, the gold went to ground in North Devon after it was landed. Edward Parrott was a prudent man, he knew exactly what would happen if word of it reached the Government. He ... he knew the score, you might say—if you will forgive the colloquialism."

Pompous bastard!

"You mean—he didn't want to hang in chains with the other pirates in execution dock?"

"Hang in chains?"

"You said it was the blackest piracy."

"And so it was, Audley, and so it was. But I mean the political score. You mustn't think of the Parrotts as mere nobodies; they were squires and gentlemen. Edward Parrott sat for Hartland in the first three of Charles I's parliaments—he owned the seat. And his son Nathaniel sat in the other two, the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. So they were dummy5

very well aware of the political situation."

Audley cudgelled his memory viciously. He knew now exactly the game Nayler was playing—and winning, petty though it was: the price of information was that he must crawl for it, admitting his ignorance.

On your knees then, Audley—for God, Queen and Country!

"What was the political situation?"

"Tck, tck, tck!" Nayler tutted contentedly down the line at him. "You have forgotten a lot, haven't you, my dear fellow!

All those tutorials, all that sherry old Highsmith poured down you—has it all gone for nothing?"

God bless my soul! thought Audley in genuine surprise, remembering for the first time how Nayler had envied his happy and boozy friendship with old Dr. Highsmith, which had made their early evening tutorials as much social occasions as academic ones. Had that really been niggling the silly man for a quarter of a century?

But the sudden recollection of those evenings was like a benison—those summer evenings, long and cool, and winter ones dark and cosy, with the mist rising off the river. . . . And the quick irony of Nayler's sarcasm now was that it unlocked his memory as nothing else could possibly have done: old Highsmith had been a born teacher saddled with an arrogant young ex-soldier who fancied himself as a budding medievalist and maintained that nothing of very great interest had happened after the year 1485—

dummy5

The tide of memory surged back: Charles I had angrily dissolved his Third Parliament one March day in 1629—

which Firth had called "the most gloomy, sad and miserable day for England in five hundred years"—and hadn't called another for eleven fateful years—

And it had been whisky, not sherry.

Audley nodded to the shade of Dr. Highsmith through the dirty window of the phone box.

"Yes, I'm afraid you're right, Professor. It's all gone now, all quite gone," he admitted abjectly.

The shade grinned and nodded back at him approvingly. The old man had always held that what one knew about oneself was what mattered, not what other people thought they knew.

Nayler sniffed contemptuously. "The Eleven Years' Tyranny, Audley. The King tried to govern without Parliament. So he had to have money—this was the time of Ship Money and monopolies and the revived Forest Laws—surely you remember that?"

Humbly now—"Yes, I do now you mention it."

"I should think so too! And there was Edward Parrott—or Sir Edward Parrott he had to become compulsorily because he owned estate worth more than £40 per annum, and pay through the nose for it; that was another of the King's tax-raising dodges—there he was, sitting on the greatest single treasure to reach this country since Drake sailed into dummy5

Plymouth fifty years before . . . and there was nothing to equal it until Anson took the Manilla galleon a century later . . . there he was, sitting on a king's ransom. Or in that political situation it was more like a kingdom's ransom.

Certainly it would never have been sent back to Spain—

never."

A kingdom's ransom. Well, maybe it was still that—in the wrong hands at the wrong moment in time . . .

"And he was against the king, of course."

"Edward Parrott?" Nayler made a judicious sound. "Say rather, Edward Parrott was for Edward Parrott. He belonged to an older era—he could remember Drake and the others, he'd sailed with them as a young lad. And by the 1630s he was an old man too—that last shipwreck ruined his health. It was his son, Nathaniel—your Parrott, Audley—he was the one who was against the King. A left-wing back-bencher in Parliament in 1640, he was—one of the Vane-St. John faction."

"So why did he wait so long to lay hands on the gold?"

"Because he didn't know where it was, that's why. Not until the very end, in 1643, when his father was dying."

"How do you know?"

"For certain, we don't know. But by '43 he was an up-and-coming Parliamentary officer, one of Cromwell's trusted lieutenants, we do know that. And we also know that he left his command in the Midlands right in the middle of the dummy5

campaigning season, when things weren't going too well for Parliament, to be at his father's deathbed. Through Royalist country, too, that meant."

"And that wasn't filial piety?"

"Filial stuff and nonsense! There was no love between them."

"Only gold?"

"Nothing else makes sense. The old man died on August 1, according to the Parish burial register. Ten days later Nathaniel was at Standingham Castle."

"And just what is the significance of that, Professor?"

"Time and place, man—time and place."

"The Steynings were related to the Parrotts, I gather."

"More than that. Nathaniel Parrott's heir was his daughter, his only child. And she was married to Steyning's only surviving son. The other two Steyning sons had already been killed in the war. So Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had the same granddaughter— their joint heiress."

"Steyning was a strong Parliament man, obviously."

"Fanatical. Parrott and Steyning were two of a kind, even though Steyning was past his soldiering days. Both fanatical Parliament men—and fanatical Puritans too. Blood, politics and religion, Audley: you can't bind two men more closely than with those three."

Despite his dislike of Nayler, Audley found himself nodding agreement to that. Family and politics and religion . . . dead dummy5

children and a live grandchild . . . those were the solid bricks of the Steyning-Parrott alliance. The Civil War had only bound them tighter together, becoming a make-or-break cause for both families.

And the gold . . . normally the possession of gold divided men more than it united them, but in these peculiar circumstances it would have been the best cement of all—a loan on behalf of their joint grandchild's future, an investment in the service of everything that they believed in.

"So, when you think about it intelligently, Audley, Standingham Castle was the one place Parrott could really feel safe in between North Devon and London."

Audley frowned. "You mean—he went there deliberately? The newspaper report said he was chased there by the Royalists."

Nayler gave a derisive snort. "My dear Audley—you don't really believe what the newspapers say, do you? Besides, he may simply have been chased where he intended to go."

"Even though it was being besieged?"

"The siege was a rather intermittent affair, or it had been up to then, certainly. And Standingham was a great stronghold too; Monson was considerably reinforced that last time, of course."

And maybe the incentive was greater, thought Audley grimly.

With a ton of gold as the prize Black Thomas would probably have chanced his arm on the gates of Hell.

"Hmm . . . You said 'time' as well as place, Professor."

dummy5

"I did indeed—don't be dense, my dear fellow. Time and place are what makes the thing certain in my mind. There was absolutely no other reason why Parrott should ride out of his way to Standingham—it wasn't as though the news of his father's death was of the least importance to anyone. He should have gone straight back to his regiment, where he was urgently needed. That's Point One.

"And Point Two is that he took far too long to get there in any case. That is, if he'd still been travelling the way he'd come.

Which of course he wasn't, because now he had a ton of gold to transport. And that would mean wagons or pack horses, probably pack horses—or pack ponies, seeing that he was coming from the West Country. But for much of the route he'd be passing through Royalist-held territory, so that would mean using back-roads and circling the main towns and villages. Quite a deal of night-marching too, I shouldn't wonder ... all of which would play the very devil with the men and the animals."

True enough, Audley conceded grudgingly. The man might be a bastard, and for sure he was being wise after the event, but he'd done his work properly all the same.

"I see. He had to have somewhere to rest up en route."

"At last you're beginning to see the light! Somewhere safe, with someone he could trust. Preferably about halfway to London. Standingham Castle and Sir Edmund Steyning."

Nayler paused. "All inference, of course—all hypothesis. But when you throw a ton of gold into the scales you'll see that dummy5

I'm right. . . . And if you're looking for more detail, I suggest you switch on your little television the Sunday after next and it'll all be there."

Indeed it would. And Charlie Ratcliffe's claim to fortune would be established to the satisfaction of tens of millions, too; established so that even those who loathed everything which he stood for would concede his right to his loot.

So the gold was real.

And the emergency was real.

The phone pipped for more money and he automatically fed the last of his change into it.

"Are you phoning from a call box?" Nayler managed to make the simple question sound contemptuous.

"Uh-huh. . . . One more thing. Professor: where do the Ratcliffes come into the story?"

"The Ratcliffes? Oh, they simply had the good fortune to marry the granddaughter—the Steyning-Parrott heiress. She was the only survivor of the whole affair, you know . . . and later on she became Cromwell's ward. It's interesting that he never married her off to anyone—interesting and possibly significant, because he was one of the first to look for the gold. . . . But then after the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 she prudently secured her estates by marrying the first impoverished Royalist who came her way. A sharp fellow by the name of Charles Ratcliffe, oddly enough."

The original Charlie Ratcliffe.

dummy5

"Even without the gold it was a good match for him,"

continued Nayler. "His family had lost everything in the war, confiscated or sold—I don't know which, and she brought him about five thousand acres in exchange for his name. It was a good English compromise, even if he was a bit of a bounder."

Pirates, religious and political fanatics— and now bounders.

If Charlie was a throwback to the seventeenth century he had everything going for him, no doubt about that, from the Parrott-Steyning-Ratcliffe connection.

But time was running out—

"You don't happen to know how the gold was found, do you, Professor?"

Nayler chuckled malevolently. "Yes I do—as it happens. But that's classified, I'm afraid, Audley. You'll have to wait your turn for that like the rest. It's a little surprise we've got up our sleeves, don't you know."

Bastard, bastard, bastard.

"But I'll tell you this, Audley: they were clever, Parrott and Steyning were. Both devious and ruthless men, no question about that. Just you wait for my little television programme, eh? Clever and devious and ruthless—and Parrott was the more ruthless of the two."

The pips sounded, and an obscene insult formed on Audley's tongue.

But then Dr. Highsmith shook his head: revenge was a dish dummy5

which should always be served cold.

"Thank you, Professor. You've been extremely—"

The phone cut him off. Extremely, unpleasantly, humiliatingly helpful. Nothing was going to shake the historical existence of that gold. The first cutting had been accurate enough. It remained to be seen whether he could improve on the second one.

3

THE signpost was just where the Brigadier had said it would be, exactly at the crest of the ridge. But then the Brigadier was always exact.

Audley parked his new 2200 carefully on the verge and studied the sign without enthusiasm. After his initial resistance he had felt the old inevitable curiosity stirring, not for the job itself, but for the ultimate why hidden somewhere at the heart of it. But now the reaction to the curiosity was setting in: such curiosity was well enough for Rikki-tikki the young mongoose, but for a respectable middle-aged husband and father it was a poor substitute for the soft breasts and soft cheeks of home after a long journey from foreign parts.

The sign was small and newly painted, or even brand new, and it bore the legend To the Monument in capital letters, and Swine Brook Field 1643 in lower case beneath them.

He climbed stiffly out of the car and surveyed the landscape.

dummy5

The crest of the ridge was quite sharp, almost a miniature hog's back compared with the undulations to the east and west of it.

But Swine Brook had to be the key, and in the valley to the west a straggle of willows and thick bushes marked the line of a stream. On his right the pastureland ran down towards the stream, flattening for the last two hundred yards into a rich water-meadow.

Swine Brook Field: the field where they once let the pigs loose.

He followed the signpost's finger down a rutted track along the line of the hog's back between overgrown hedges of bramble and hawthorn. If this had been the battle-front of one of the 1643 armies it would have been a strong position, no doubt about that with the hedge to hide the musketeers and the reverse slope to the east to snug down the cavalry out of sight.

Except that he didn't know which side had fought where at Swine Brook Field yet, only that it had been the King's Cavaliers who had won the day.

Cavalier—wrong, but romantic; Roundhead—right, but repulsive.

Which side would Sir David Audley have been? Would he have followed his head or his heart? Or his religion? Or his father? Or his county? Or the source of his income?

But there was another thing for sure: of all wars, civil wars dummy5

were the cruellest, 1640s and 1970s no different. Because the winning and the losing was rarely the end of them, as old Sir Jacob had seen—

Paul Mitchell was leaning on a farm gate set back in the thickness of the hedge, waiting for him with well-simulated patience.

No mistaking Paul. The first time Audley had seen him, across a table strewn with maps and documents in the Military Studies Institute, he'd been hidden under a near-revolutionary shock of mousey hair, and the last time the shock had been tamed to an army trim, blond-rinsed. Now the mouse-colour was back and the length too, with a van Dyke beard and moustache, cavalier-style and flecked with ginger. But no disguise, natural grown or artificial, could hide the predatory Paul underneath; at least, not from the eyes of the man who had recruited him to the Queen's service.

At the time, almost at the first glance, it had seemed the clever thing to attempt it; and every aptitude test and training report since then had confirmed his intuition. If there was any logic and justice to promotion, Paul would be running a section in five years' time, and a department five years after that, and the whole bloody show five years after that.

And in the meantime, what could be more sensible than to let him win his spurs under the control of the man who had dummy5

identified his natural talents at a glance?

God help us all, thought Audley. Paul is a fine feather in my cap—and how glad I am that I won't be wearing that cap in fifteen years' time!

"Hullo, David. You're looking bronzed and fit."

For a bet, Mitchell knew where he'd been these last weeks.

"Bronzed and fit, my eye! I'm tired and bad-tempered, and you had better believe that. . . . Good afternoon, Paul. You look like a sociology lecturer at a radical polytechnic. Does this gate open, or do I have to climb over it?"

"It doesn't open."

"But you have to watch out for your trousers—there's a strand of barbed wire on the top, just this side. I've already torn my jeans on the danm thing," said Frances Fitzgibbon as she came into view at Mitchell's shoulder. "And I think I've spiked my bottom, too."

Audley stared at her against his will. The thought of Frances Fitzgibbon's little bottom was arresting, as was the thought and sight of all her other components, miniature though they were. It wasn't that she was in the least beautiful, or even that she was pretty except in a pert, early-flowering, childish way. But at first sight she was the sensual essence of every man's imagined indiscretion with the girl glimpsed across the shop counter.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Fitzgibbon— Frances," said Audley carefully.

dummy5

It was always the same: after that first sight the truth about Frances Fitzgibbon dowsed desire like a bucket of ice-water.

Despite appearances—which so totally belied reality that she was worth a fortune to the department as she stood, torn jeans and all—Frances was a kindly and serious-minded young woman trapped in the wrong body, who deserved a better fate than having to work with Paul Mitchell . . . and maybe with David Audley too.

"How are Faith and little Cathy?" asked Frances.

"They were fine when I last saw them some weeks ago."

The brown eyes became sympathetic. "Like that, is it? They double-crossed you again? Poor David—I'm sorry."

"And I'm sorry about the—barbed wire."

Mitchell grinned. "I offered to render first aid, but she wasn't having any."

The eyes flashed. "I should hope not!"

Mitchell too, thought Audley. But that was the predictable male response, a sort of protective lust, and at least they were of an age. Two more babies.

"Never mind, Frances dear," Mitchell went on unrepentantly,

"you have an honourable injury On Her Majesty's Service to console you—

Then will she strip her . . . jeans

and show her scars

dummy5

And say, 'These wounds I had on

Swine Brook Field'

—and David has us to console him."

Babies. Or if not babies then mere children, they had given him to do this job. Clever children, but children all the same.

And now they were making him feel older than he really was, and not a little jealous too.

"Some consolation!" murmured Frances.

Audley cleared his throat. He had to stop this sparring and start asserting his authority.

"Very well, then ..." He pointed to the plain stone cross which rose from the grass a dozen yards down the hillside. "I take it that is the monument, and Swine Brook Field is beyond it."

"That's right," said Mitchell. "And the stream down there is the Swine Brook, no less."

Audley was unhappily aware that he had observed the obvious, and that Mitchell had capped him deliberately by adding the equally obvious.

"So what happened?"

"What happened ..." Mitchell paused momentarily. "Well, we're standing just about midway along the spectator line.

They filled in right along the ridge—" he spread his arms out on each side "—about a quarter of a mile to the left and right dummy5

of us here. And there were ropes strung along to keep them from spreading too far down the hill and getting mixed up in the battle. So—"

"I meant,what happened in 1643?" said Audley waspishly. It was just possible that Mitchell hadn't considered it necessary to take his researches that far back, and nothing would put him down more surely than having to admit a little healthy ignorance.

"In 1643?"

"In the battle. Swine Brook Field, 1643," said Audley with exaggerated patience. "I like to start at the beginning."

"Okay." Mitchell shrugged. "We're on the attack line—they came over the hill from behind us—"

"Who is they?"

Mitchell looked at him uncertainly.

"You don't know anything about the battle?"

"If I did I wouldn't be asking. Who came over the hill?"

"The Royalists." Mitchell's voice was just a shade sharper.

"The Roundhead relief convoy was travelling up the valley, on the old road to Standingham alongside the stream, more or less."

"A convoy?"

"Wagons and carts, that's right. They call it a battle, but the truth is it was more like an ambush—or an overgrown skirmish that worked like an ambush. The Royalists weren't dummy5

really lying in wait for them, they were simply trying to stop them getting to Standingham and this was where they collided. It just happened to work out badly for the Roundheads and perfectly for the Royalists, that's all."

"What was in the wagons?"

"General supplies, but mostly cannon-balls and gunpowder, apparently. . . . There was this man Monson—Lord Thomas Monson, or 'Black Thomas' as they called him—who was besieging Standingham Hall. It wasn't a big affair: Monson had about 700 men and there were maybe 250 inside the perimeter at Standingham—maybe less. In fact, it was more like a local feud, because the Monsons of Ingham Hall and the Steynings of Standingham Castle were neighbours. Only they just happened to hate each other's guts."

"Because Monson was a Royalist and Steyning was a Roundhead?"

"That was the way it was. But that wasn't the only reason why they hated each other. There was also bad blood between them over a lawsuit of years before, when they'd both laid claim to the same piece of land somewhere, or something.

And the King's court ruled in Monson's favour—he had more influence with the King, so the story goes. It was a typical feud situation—like a range war in the Wild West."

Audley nodded. "I see. So when the Civil War broke out Monson naturally sided with the King."

"Exactly. And Steyning declared for Parliament."

dummy5

"So when Monson laid siege to Standingham Hall, then Steyning sent to Parliament for help. And they sent him these supplies?"

"That's right. And when Monson heard about it he appealed to the King, and the King lent him two regiments of cavalry, and he rode back hell for leather to head off the supply column. Also, at the same time, he ordered up 300 of his best men from the siege lines to block the old road at the top of this valley." Mitchell pointed upstream. "He probably planned to rendezvous here before the Roundhead convoy arrived. But they arrived ahead of schedule and ran into the road-block first, and they were just about to deploy against it when Black Thomas reached the ridge here with the cavalry."

"I see. And being a good cavalier he charged straight in and beat them?" Audley stared down the hillside. The question was almost unnecessary; if the country had been anything like this in 1643 then the unfortunate Parliamentarians wouldn't have stood a chance, caught deploying in the open by the Royalist horsemen on the ridge above them. Charging at the gallop was the one thing the cavaliers did well from the start of the war, he remembered.

The problem was to stop them from charging too far, right through the enemy and off the battlefield altogether. But here on Swine Brook Field, the Swine Brook itself would have prevented them from doing that. Plus, no doubt, the prospect of plundering the wagons.

"Yes, that's just about it," agreed Mitchell. "Most of the dummy5

convoy escort ran away, but the Royalists butchered a couple of hundred on the banks of the stream. It was all over in a quarter of an hour."

"It all sounds rather dull," said Audley.

"It sounds rather nasty to me," said Frances.

"The gentry killing the peasantry, you mean?" Mitchell raised an eyebrow. Then he grinned at Audley. "She's a proper little Roundhead at heart, you know. A Puritan maid despite appearances."

There was more truth in that than Mitchell intended, thought Audley.

"I simply don't find killing attractive," said Frances coolly.

"Or military history interesting."

That was one deliberately in Mitchell's eye, for that had been his chosen career before Audley had tempted him into one even more suitable for his talents, as Frances well knew.

"Well, as a battle so-called it was rather dull," Mitchell nodded at Audley, wisely ignoring her challenge. "But it did produce one celebrated anecdote that lost nothing in the telling. A real bloodthirsty story—literally bloodthirsty."

"Literally?"

"Literally, it's the exact word for once. You see, Black Thomas was so desperate to get here before the Roundheads did that he wouldn't let his men halt. Kept them going non-stop after they'd run out of water, and it was a hot August day—hot and humid, because it had rained during the night before. So by dummy5

the time they reached this ridge they were pretty damn thirsty, and they'd been grumbling about it.

"So when he finally got them here he pointed down to the Swine Brook—which was beyond the enemy, of course—and told them there was plenty of water there, and they could drink to their heart's content when they'd reached it. All they had to do was to remove the base, vulgar fellows who were in their way.

"At least, that's the story according to Royalist propaganda as told by Mercurius Aulicus in Oxford afterwards. But the Roundheads had a different version— according to Mercurius Britanicus in London. He claimed that since Black Thomas had sold his soul to the devil, water couldn't quench his thirst, only blood. And when he reached the stream it was running red with the blood of the slain, so he ordered a trooper to bring him a helmet-full, which he promptly drank, thus proving he was in league with Beelzebub."

"Yrch!" exclaimed Frances. "You are disgusting, Paul."

"Not me, Frances dear. This is straight Mercurius Britanicus.''

"And what really happened?" asked Audley.

"A bit of both, I'd guess. They would have been thirsty right enough. And he could well have said 'There's water down there', or some such thing."

"And did the stream run with blood?"

dummy5

"That's the story. There were a lot of men killed along it, so there's no reason why it shouldn't have. It wouldn't be the first time it's supposed to have happened either—didn't the River Cock run red at Towton in the Wars of the Roses?"

"But would they have drunk from it then?" asked Frances.

"You bet they would. Thirsty men have drunk a lot worse than that—and been grateful for it." Mitchell nodded towards Audley. "David'll quote you Gunga Din in support of that, if you like—how does it go?

It was crawlin' and it stunk,

But of all the drinks I've drunk

I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.

That right, David?"

Word perfect, thought Audley suspiciously. Paul Mitchell had done his homework on Swine Brook Field; or it might be that with his military history background, and his eerie faculty for total recall of every fact he had ever encountered, no homework had been needed; but by the same token he wouldn't have forgotten Audley's own weakness for quotations, particularly from Shakespeare and Kipling, and that he was now deliberately and maliciously exploiting it.

"Absolutely correct." In other circumstances he might have capped Mitchell with another quotation. But with Mitchell it dummy5

might be as well to resist such temptations. The young man's knowledge was once more going to be as useful as his brains, and he could see now why the Brigadier had supplied him.

But it was going to take some getting used to, the handling for the first time of a subordinate who could equal him at his own game, and had no scruples about trying to do so.

"That's very apposite, Paul. And most interesting." He smiled patronisingly. "So the Royalists won the battle of Swine Brook Field. Now then—"

"But there's more to it than that," cut in Mitchell quickly.

"You see, if it hadn't been for that—the bloodthirsty Monson story—it's a hundred to one we wouldn't be here now.

Because the Double R people —the Royalist and Roundhead Society— arranged to have the stream run red again for their mock battle. And in the end it was that which gave the game away. The murder, that is—"

"No, Paul." Audley held up his hand. "I want to get that first hand." He looked at his watch. "We're due to meet the police at the scene of the crime in ten minutes from now. I need to hear their side first before your interpretation of it."

That was the truth, or at least the truth only slightly bent to bring it home to Mitchell that it was David Audley, not Paul Mitchell, who was running the operation.

"What I want now, before we meet them, is a rundown on this Double R Society. Not the mock-battle, just the Society,"

Audley said innocently, still pretending to concentrate on dummy5

Mitchell.

Mitchell's face fell. "Oh—well, you'll have to ask Frances about them, they're her pigeons."

"I see. . . . Well, Frances?" He turned towards her.

With Frances there were no special reservations to be made.

But there was, he was instantly reminded, one disconcerting tendency to be mastered. Being all of eight inches taller than she was, he was forced to look down on her, and in looking down he found it extremely difficult to stop at her face.

Indeed, no matter that the faded denim shirt was chastely buttoned to the neck—by some unjust alchemy that seemed to emphasise what it was intended to conceal—he found himself now looking directly at her chest.

Damnation!

He tried again. One quick look at her

"The Double R Society?"

And then away from her altogether. Anywhere.

"In one word . . ." If she had observed the first glance she gave no sign of at. Probably she was used to men with eyes like organ-stops, poor girl. "In a word— weird."

"Weird . . . meaning?"

She shook her head. "It's not easy to explain. There are a number of these Civil War groups . . . the Sealed Knot was the first one. Then there's the King's Army and the Roundhead Association, who operate together. They all do pretty much the same thing—mock-battles for charity dummy5

mostly. Charity and the fun of it, that's how it seemed to me at first ..."

"On the actual battlefields always?"

"For choice. They will put on a show anywhere, of course. But they prefer authentic locations. They like to get as close to the real thing as possible."

Weird. He had to make allowance for her prejudice against military history—and against war itself. Weird or not, these Civil War buffs would start out with two strikes against them so far as Frances Fitzgibbon was concerned.

"And they do it for the fun of it, obviously. Dressing up and all that?"

"That's what I thought at first." Frances frowned. "But there's more to it than that ... I don't know about the other groups, but with the Double R Society it's rather more complicated.

They stage the battles for charity like the others, with thousands of people watching. And the battles are combined with seventeenth-century fairs and plays and concerts—also like the others. But they don't actually do all this for the spectators and the audiences—if nobody turned up they'd do it just the same. They do it for themselves, if you see what I mean. It's not a game or a hobby, it's almost an obsession.

And in a strange way it's even more than that . . . not just obsession. There's almost an element of possession."

"You mean—they don't just play at being Royalists and Roundheads? They are Royalists and Roundheads?"

dummy5

"I think that's what I mean ..." She nodded doubtfully. "But I still don't really understand what makes them tick."

"There's a lot of esprit de corps in the different regiments, that's for sure," agreed Mitchell. "They have their own badges and they're proud of them."

"Oh, no—it's more than that, Paul. The other Civil War groups have that too."

"I don't just mean that." Mitchell caught Audley's eye.

"They're also extremely knowledgeable. And they won't let you join just to have a punch-up in costume; you have to know your history pretty damn well first."

"You're both in the process of joining, I gather?" Audley looked from one to the other.

"That's right—in fact we've both just joined. Young Frances there is a brand new Angel of Mercy for God and Parliament

—" Mitchell pointed and then tapped his own chest "—and I'm one of King Charles's laughing cavaliers."

"A Malignant," murmured Frances.

"A Malignant. And a profane and licentious limb of Satan—

that is, if I can find a horse in time for Saturday." Mitchell smiled boyishly at Audley. "That was the chief reason they let me in so quickly. There's a waiting list for the pikemen and musketeers, so they vet them much more carefully. But they're dead short of people willing to supply their own horses. Once I showed my heart was in the right place and I had a horse, I was in." The smile broadened to a wicked dummy5

cavalier grin. "Whereas they're always on the lookout for good-looking Angels of Mercy, I suspect. . . . Though I must say, Frances, you're going to have quite a problem looking like a modest Puritan maiden. You haven't got the figure for the job."

"Fiddlesticks!" Frances turned towards Audley. "But Paul's right about having to have one's heart in the right place. You can't join the Roundhead Wing or the Royalist Wing unless you believe in the appropriate politics.''

Audley nodded. "Naturally. I'd expect the Royalists to believe in the monarchy, and the Roundheads to believe in Parliament."

Frances shook her head. "It goes much further than that.

They asked me which party I'd voted for in the last General Election."

"They?"

'There's a membership committee which meets once a month to interview applicants. We were lucky to get a hearing so quickly—it's quite a complicated procedure, really."

"You can say that again," agreed Mitchell. "They've even got a form to fill in—with spaces on it for religion and politics, and God knows what else."

"So what did you tell them?"

Mitchell laughed. "I told 'em what I thought they wanted to hear: that I was a good Tory and a practising member of the Church of England. And that I thought socialism was as bad dummy5

as communism—they liked that almost as much as when I said I had my own horse."

Audley looked at Frances.

And at Frances's bosom.

Damnation again!

"I had a different committee," said Frances. "And I told them I was a paid-up member of the Labour Party. Which happens to be true."

"I asked my lot what they would have done if I said I was a Marxist-Trotskyite," said Mitchell.

"And?" Audley felt the sun hot on his face.

"There was one chap with a sense of humour. He fell around as though I was pulling his leg—as though the idea of anyone being a Trotskyite was a joke. But the other one next to him took it seriously, like I'd said something dirty. And he said that Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men and Levellers all went into the Parliamentary Wing."

So that was the way of it, thought Audley. Or it looked very much as though it could be the way of it. And if it was—

"I think your policemen have arrived." Frances pointed down the hillside towards the Swine Brook.

"I left my field-glasses on the monument," said Mitchell.

"One look through them and we can be sure."

Audley followed him down to the stone cross, his mind too full of possibilities to take anything else in.

dummy5

If that was the way of it ...

Mitchell adjusted the field-glasses. "That's Superintendent Weston. . . . And the sergeant."

Audley found himself looking at the inscription chiselled into the granite:

SWINE BROOK FIELD

1643

We are both upon the stage and must

act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy; let us do it in a way of honour.

And so they must. Except if that was the way of it, then it was unlikely that there would be much room for honour.

4

“WESTON'S a sharp fellow, don't be deceived by appearances," warned Mitchell. "He goes by the book—they all do, of course—but he's got quite a reputation, according to Cox."

So Mitchell had consulted their own Special Branch superintendent, thought Audley. A very thorough young man, Mitchell ... in his place he would have done exactly the same, because Cox's memory was encyclopaedic. But it was still another score to Mitchell that he had known exactly who dummy5

to go to for first-hand information.

He stared at the memorial. It not only looked new, it was new: he could see the fragments of fresh mortar trampled into the grass around it.

He pointed. "How long has this been here? Not long?"

"A month. Wherever they do a re-enactment the Double R

people always set aside some of their profits for a memorial if there isn't one already there. It's part of their public relations," said Mitchell. "Are we going to see Weston and the sergeant now?"

A thorough young man. ... He took in the inscription again. It summed up very well the sad plight of the moderate man pushed at last by the extremists to take his stand, and discovering then that he had delayed too long and that the only chance left to him was to join one hated side or the other.

Like—who was it? The man had also had a memorial dedicated to him, on, a battlefield of this same Civil War where he had fallen, he remembered having seen it years before.

"Are we going to see Weston?" Mitchell repeated.

Who was it? It suddenly became important to Audley to dredge the name out of his memory, as though it was the key to other forgotten things. Mitchell wouldn't have forgotten, damn him.

Not John Hampden. He had a memorial somewhere—at dummy5

Charlgrove, where Prince Rupert and the Royalists had killed him. But Hampden had been a Parliamentarian.

This man had been a Royalist . . . and a poet—

Falkland!

Little Falkland, with his ugly face and his shrill voice; but everyone had loved him for his kindness and his generosity and his learning. . . . And when the last hope of a negotiated peace had vanished and he had understood at last that whoever won, the moderates on each side had lost, he had saddled up and joined the King's cavalry and had calmly and deliberately ridden to certain death.

Suicide while the balance of the mind was undisturbed.

But not a mistake that David Audley would make.

"This quotation—" he looked at Mitchell "—who's it from?

Falkland?"

"No." Mitchell eyed him curiously. "Why d'you ask?"

"Because I want to know. Not Falkland?"

"No." Mitchell stared at the memorial. "It could have been at that, I suppose. . . . But actually it was William Waller, the Parliamentary general. He was writing to old Sir Ralph Hopton before they fought each other at Landsdown—they'd been comrades years before in the German wars—"

"I remember." Audley nodded. Surprisingly he did remember, too: Hopton had written first, hoping to win over his old friend, or at least to win time. And Waller had rejected his overture, but in the' noblest terms—

dummy5

With what a hatred I detest this war without an enemy . . .

He felt his confidence begin to flow again, diffusing inside him like the warmth of a hot drink on a freezing day. Mitchell was a very thorough young man, as he had proved again this minute. But that was a virtue to be used, not to be feared.

"Right. I shall now see Superintendent Weston and the sergeant." He didn't want either of them with him down there beside the Swine Brook: each would put him off his stroke, though in very different ways. But in any case they would be better employed elsewhere. "By myself."

They looked at him questioningly, and that was good.

"When does the—the Double R Society fight its next battle?"

"Easingbridge, the day after tomorrow —Saturday," said Mitchell promptly. "They're putting on a performance at the annual fete and flower show. Do you want us to be there?"

"Can you get a horse in time?"

Mitchell shrugged. "If you pushed me —I guess so."

"I'm pushing." Audley turned to Frances. "And you must be there too."

"No problem." She nodded readily. "All I need is a costume."

"Good. . . . Now, in the meantime, Frances, I want you to research the Roundhead—ah—''

"Wing." Mitchell supplied the word.

dummy5

"The Roundhead Wing. And particularly how Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe fits into it. But don't be too obvious with the questions." He swung back to Mitchell. "And you, Paul—"

"Let me guess. Would a ton of gold be close?"

"Close enough. What d'you know about it?"

"Only what's been in the papers. The Brigadier told me to lay off it until you gave the word, just to check out Swine Brook Field." The corner of Mitchell's mouth lifted. "But I can add two and two as well as the next man."

"And what do you get?"

"Giving Charlie Ratcliffe a fortune is like handing a stick of gelignite to a juvenile delinquent: he's going to want to play with it one way or another, and either way something's going to get damaged."

"A whole box of gelignite, more like," said Frances.

So they'd done their homework, and something more. But with two like this that was to be expected.

"You want me to go down to Standingham?" asked Mitchell.

Audley shook his head. Sending someone as keen as Mitchell to Standingham was just asking for something violent to happen, and that would never do.

"Not yet. It's research for you, my lad. I want to know all there is to know about that gold of Ratcliffe's—chemical analysis, and so on. And I want to know more about the history, too. The experts all said there wasn't any gold; I want to know why he thought differently."

dummy5

Mitchell perked up at that. "You think somebody sparked him off?"

"At the moment I don't think anything, except my feet ache."

Audley turned towards Frances, steadying his eyes on her face with a conscious effort. He must think of her as someone's daughter. "I want you to concentrate on the Double R Society, Frances, remember. It's only information I want, nothing else."

He watched them climb the gate and disappear down the track between the hedgerows.

He had laid that last bit on rather too thick, the bit about information. There wasn't anything she could get other than that, and the frown she had given him back said as much. He must try to sound more like his usual belligerent self next time.

He began to descend the hillside.

At one time or another he had walked across quite a few battlefields, he reflected, and many of them had featured ridges not unlike this one: Vimy and Waterloo, Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and Senlac Ridge at Hastings, Hameau Ridge on the Somme where he had first got to know the real Paul Mitchell. . . . One of his ancestors had even died on a ridge at Salamanca, riding at General Le Marchant's side.

Of course this ridge was small beer compared with those, but dummy5

it now shared with them the lack of any distinguishing mark which singled it out as a place where men had once buckled down to the serious business of killing each other. Just as the more recent marks of the Double R Society's mock-battle had faded, so there were no residual emanations of King Charles I and his Parliament, the Lord's Anointed and the Lord's Elected Representatives.

Or, presumably, of what had also been staged here on behalf of Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe.

He could see Superintendent Weston waiting for him.

If Cox had said Weston was a sharp fellow then he was a sharp fellow; because Cox himself, for all that he looked like a retired PT instructor, had a mind like a cut-throat razor.

So it would be better to make a friend of Weston than to try and bullshit him with the letter of introduction he carried in his pocket.

"Superintendent Weston?"

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor . . . retired PT instructor . . .

none of those, certainly. Say, a middle-aged country doctor with the authority of half a lifetime of births and deaths behind him.

"Dr. Audley." The Superintendent advanced towards him, but the sergeant stayed back like an obedient gun-dog waiting for his signal.

dummy5

Confidence tempered by caution.

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Superintendent."

"That's all right, sir. It's quite nice to have an excuse to get away from my desk for an hour or two."

Caution plus neutrality. But no overt hostility, and in Weston's place Audley knew that he would be hopping mad behind an identical façade.

"Your Chief Constable will have told you why I'm here."

Audley paused significantly. "It's on the instructions of the Home Secretary."

Weston nodded slowly. "In connection with the Ratcliffe investigation." He matched Audley's pause, second for second. "And you want my sergeant."

And that, of course, was adding injury to insult: bad enough for some anonymous Home Office official to descend on a hardworking police force empowered to ask questions without the obligation of answering any in the midst of a stalled murder case, implying dissatisfaction, in high places; but to detach a useful officer from the duty rota when the force was already overstretched—all forces were overstretched—that had to be beyond the bloody limit.

Yet Weston still appeared cool enough and that was no good at all for the sort of answers that were needed. Somehow he had to be made to drop his defences. But pulling rank wouldn't achieve that any more than a straight appeal for help, which would only be despised.

dummy5

He realised suddenly that he was staring fixedly at Weston, and that Weston was returning the stare with interest. In another moment they would be in a staring match.

"I gather he was your man on the spot." He shifted the stare to the sergeant. "In fact, very much on the spot."

He took in the younger man in detail for the first time.

Younger was right; over the years he had grown accustomed to the truth of the cliché that police constables grew younger and younger as one advanced into senility. But now the sergeants were growing younger too: if Weston passed as a middle-aged country doctor, Sergeant Digby could have been a first-year medical student, no longer wholly innocent but as yet unmarked by his profession.

Another baby to make him feel old and jealous.

And another clever baby, if what the Brigadier had said was to be believed.

"You'll have read his statement, then. And the others."

Weston's voice cut through his line of thought.

"His statement?" Audley frowned stupidly. Maybe they weren't babies after all—a month of humid Washington and a few hours' flying, and he couldn't keep his mind on the job for five consecutive minutes. Maybe they weren't babies at all

—maybe he must just be getting too old.

Weston heaved a carefully-controlled breath. "Transcripts of all the statements taken in the course of the investigation so far have been sent to the Home Secretary." He paused, dummy5

watching Audley impassively. "I assume you've studied them, sir."

Statements.

Of course there had been statements. Dozens of statements, hundreds of statements. Names and occupations and places and times and facts. Statements to be checked and cross-checked and double-checked. Statements to be read and re-read and sieved and strained and refined.

That was what a murder investigation was: not a brilliant tour de force by a Sherlock Holmes, but an organised routine carried out by dozens of men and women working sixteen hours a day.

Of course there would be statements. In fact, with the Ratcliffe investigation the way it was that was all there would be at this moment. Just statements.

And nine times out of ten the police could be pretty sure, that somewhere in that mass of paper was the name they wanted, and that if it was there they would get to it in the end. Not by luck—the whole system was built to eliminate luck as far as possible, because luck had to be arbitrarily good or bad in equal proportions—but by the cold mathematics of routine multiplied by team work multiplied by sixteen hours a day.

Only this had to be the tenth time; the time when there was no name and all the multiplication was ruined by a final zero factor. And if Superintendent Weston was half as good a policeman as Cox believed him to be, then he would know it.

dummy5

The trick was to make him admit it. ...

Why not the truth? thought Audley suddenly.

He smiled at Weston. "No. I haven't read any statements."

"No . . . sir?" Weston's impassivity was a work of high art.

"Not one single word." The truth was supposed to set men free, perhaps it might set them both free now. "Just two newspaper reports."

Weston continued to stare at him expressionlessly, reserving his right to burst into laughter or tears.

"Four hours ago ..." Audley consulted his watch casually "...

actually rather less than four hours ago ... I'd never even heard of either the Ratcliffe family or Swine Brook Field. As a matter of fact I was on a jet from New York four hours ago—

minding my own business."

At last the hint of an emotion showed on Weston's face: one corner of his mouth twitched.

"But now you have to mind ours for us?"

"It does rather look that way." Audley nodded slowly, then converted the nod into a negative shake. "But I wouldn't have read the statements anyway."

"No?" The twitch became the beginning of—it might be a snarl or it might be a smile.

"No." The implications of that he had to let Weston work out for himself: it had to be either an insult or a vote of confidence, according to whether Cox's assessment was dummy5

wrong or right.

A smile.

"Quite right too. Take you a week to read—and then you'd only be where we are."

Cox had been right.

"Which is nowhere?"

"Which is nowhere." The smile completed its journey and then vanished. "And you work for the Home Office, Dr.

Audley—is that right?"

Polite disbelief. Am I right? meaning I am wrong, aren't I?

Cox had understated the reality.

"Does that matter, Superintendent?"

"Not to me, sir. To my sergeant it might, I'm thinking."

Audley flicked a glance at the sergeant, to find that he too was being carefully scrutinised. He wondered whether the sergeant was thinking he's old for this job, just as he'd been thinking a few moments before how very young the sergeant was. But then the sergeant could hardly know what the job was, of course.

And that was one aspect of the truth which must be ducked.

"I'll try not to keep him too long."

"No skin off my nose. He isn't really one of mine, not yet."

"Not . . . one of yours?"

"He's been attached to me for this case.

Audley frowned. "You mean he's not CID?"

dummy5

"He has been. And he will be again before I'm very much older. But at this moment he's uniform branch."

They were up to the second of the two things he needed from the Superintendent before he had asked the first vital question. But Weston had already half answered that with his suspicion that Audley wasn't just a Home Office busybody: clearly he'd already smelt a rat in the Ratcliffe case.

"Tell me about him, Superintendent."

"Sergeant Digby?" Weston's face hardened. "He's a good copper. With the makings of a very good one."

"He looks very young ... to be a sergeant."

"You think so?" Weston managed to look amused without softening his expression. "This time next year he'll be an inspector."

Well, well! thought Audley. But then—why not? The police fought an unending war against crime, and in war the company commanders were often no older than Sergeant Digby. No doubt there'd been plenty of fresh-faced young captains-of-horse in Cromwell's panzers, the New Model Army.

"Indeed?" And, come to that, it didn't take much imagination to turn Paul Mitchell into a hard-faced young colonel, not yet out of his twenties. Ruthlessness had never been the prerogative of old age, after all.

"Scholarship boy, Henry Digby was— Fenton Grammar dummy5

School, before it went comprehensive." Pride and regret were evenly distributed in Weston's voice. "And they went for flyers then, too. Eleven 'O' levels he had, and three 'A' levels—

good ones, too. Could have gone to university for the asking, and his mother wanted him to. A teacher, that's what she had in mind for him."

"But he wanted to be a policeman?" Familiar pattern, even if the ambition was eccentric: all those examination honours were no good if mother couldn't pass her psychology test.

Likely she'd have stood a better chance of making a teacher of him if she'd insisted on helmet and handcuffs.

Weston nodded. "Three commendations in his first two years. One year as a detective constable, and I marked him for accelerated promotion myself. . . . We sent him to Bramshill."

"Bramshill?"

"Police College. One of the top three of his year."

"But then you put him back into uniform?"

"That's the rule. Uniform sergeant for one year. Then automatic promotion to inspector—and I'll have him as one of mine if it's the last thing I do. He's the sort we need, a born thief-taker if ever I saw one . . . bright, but not flashy. That's the way they made 'em at Fenton Grammar when old Jukes was headmaster. So you be careful of him . . . sir." The hard look was granite now. "I want him back when you've finished with him, too."

dummy5

"I wasn't thinking of kidnapping him, Superintendent."

"No?" Granite veined with calculation. "Just so he doesn't acquire a taste for Special Branch work, that's all."

"Recruiting for the Special Branch isn't one of my duties, that I promise you."

Audley returned the look. "But you think this is shaping into a Special Branch case?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't, no." Not much, by God. That was further confirmation of the as yet unasked question. But they'd come back to that when the time was right. "So . . . bright, but not flashy. A good copper. A real thief-taker."

"Aye." Weston was no slouch himself: he was tensed up for the next question already.

"And yet he's a member of this . . . this Double R Society."

One controlled nod. "That's correct, sir."

"And the Roundhead Wing of it, presumably, yes?" That was mere deduction: the one thing the Brigadier had said about Digby was that he'd been down by the stream throughout the battle, a mere stone's throw from the scene of the killing.

Another nod. So Sergeant Digby was a Roundhead.

"Who are perhaps a little weird?"

"Some of them are. And some of the Royalists too," Weston admitted. "But not Sergeant Digby."

"It doesn't surprise you that he's a member?"

dummy5

"There are plenty of perfectly respectable citizens on both sides." Weston was doing his best to sound matter-of-fact rather than defensive. "Amateur historians and teachers and such like—a few retired army officers too. ... And the prospective Labour candidate for this area is a Roundhead officer, actually."

Audley shook his head, smiling. "You haven't answered my question—actually."

Weston shrugged. "We encourage our men to have their own hobbies. Sergeant Digby attended one of these mock-battles when he was a uniformed constable."

"On duty, you mean?"

"That's right. We always have three or four men at these things, for crowd control and such like—they can draw as big a crowd as a second division football match, these mock-battles. We've had up to ten thousand people for a big one.

So the Society asks us for men, and pays for them . . . and we throw in half a dozen special constables for free."

"I see. And he attended one and then became interested?"

Audley nodded. One of those eleven 'O' levels had to be History, and maybe one of the 'A' levels too. And for a bet, the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still more popular among schoolmasters than that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries now, just as it had been in his own schooldays. So that figured well enough.

But it damn well wasn't the only thing that figured—and that dummy5

figured even better, Audley thought triumphantly as he stared at Weston.

We encourage our men to have their hobbies.

I'll bet we do!

"Have you ever been to one of these battles, Superintendent?" Try as he would, he couldn't make the question sound innocent.

"I have, yes." And try as he would, Weston had the same trouble with his reply. "Have you, sir?"

"No. Not my ... scene, as they say." And not Superintendent Weston's scene either, for a hundred-to-one bet. "But I'm learning fast—about the police as well as the Civil War."

For a moment they stared at each other. Then, as abruptly as it had disappeared a few minutes before, the smile came back to Weston's mouth. But this time the humour spread, crinkling up the whole face.

Finally Weston grinned broadly. "All right, Dr. Audley—I give you best there. He did get interested, I told you no lie. It was partly because he is interested in history, too."

"But you were interested too, eh?"

Weston beamed. "It's a pleasure to do business with you, Dr.

Audley."

"Even your own business?"

"Better you than some fool who thinks he knows all the answers."

dummy5

"Quite so. Whereas I don't even know all the questions yet. ...

So he came to you and asked permission to join?"

"Not to me. This was while he was still in uniform as a constable."

"Of course. I was forgetting. He went to his uniform superintendent." Audley nodded.

"That's right. But he was due for a CID transfer in a few months' time, and his super knew I had my eye on the Double R people."

"Uh-huh. ... So you gave him your blessing—you even encouraged him." The pleasure, thought Audley, was mutual: this must be a good force, in which the men in charge of the different branches were on the same side, unlike some of those in his own service.

"One volunteer's worth a dozen pressed men. And young Digby was made to measure for what I wanted."

"Which was?"

Weston thought for a moment, staring up sightlessly towards the ridge. The hottest part of the afternoon was almost spent, but with no breath of wind the skyline still shimmered with heat. There wasn't a sign of life or movement anywhere. In an hour or two, with the first cool of evening, it would be different; but now the landscape seemed exhausted, almost stupefied.

It was hard to imagine that the hillside, this same hillside, had once boiled with murderous activity—that Black dummy5

Thomas's cavalry had swept down it, desperate with thirst.

weir

Audley licked his lips. On second thoughts that thirst wasn't so unimaginable. And he'd already decided that one place was as good as another when it came to killing, hadn't he?

Weston turned back to him. "How much d'you know about these Double R people?"

"Not a lot yet." Audley returned the look candidly. "But I think at the moment I'd rather like to avoid jumping to conclusions. Which is pretty much the answer to my question, I suspect: you didn't just want an inside man—a spy. Would that be about the size of things?"

"That's very good. Dr. Audley. You're absolutely right.

Crime's one thing and prejudice is another, and the copper who mixes them up only makes trouble for himself. My business is crime."

"You had a prejudice against them?"

"Not to start with. It was more like curiosity.

"Professional curiosity?"

"Indirectly, I read about one of these battles they staged, when there were a dozen people carted off to hospital. And it occurred to me if that had been a football match I'd have thought 'Aye aye—the local yobbos are getting out of hand'.

So I went to have a look at one of their shows for myself, unofficially."

"And—?"

dummy5

"Well, they differ, of course. The Sealed Knot—pretty respectable ... the King's Army—lots of beer and good fellowship. Both keen on their history. Discipline not bad really. Safety regulations . . . well, improving, let's say."

"Safety regulations? So there's an element of danger—but if they cart people off to hospital obviously there is. Silly question."

"Not so silly. Before I read that newspaper report I'd assumed their battles were glorified pageants—cream puffs at five yards sort of thing. And after I'd seen one . . . well, I must say I was surprised by what I saw.

"I suppose the size of the battle plays a part in it. Sometimes there are only three or four dozen putting on a parade and a bit of old-fashioned drill at a fete—'Shoulder Your Pikes' and

'Advance Your Pikes', that sort of thing. But the first big fight I saw the Double R people stage, down in the west of the county it was . . . there were six or seven hundred of them, and it wasn't cream-puffs at five yards at all—it was pretty brutal. They really went at each other."

"Undisciplined, you mean?"

"No, they were disciplined all right. Just like the others. They keep together in their regiments, as they call them. And they charge each other in their regiments too, I can tell you."

"Like a rugger scrum?" Audley tried without success to envisage a rugger scrum in seventeenth-century battledress, with three hundred a side. "But they're carrying pikes, aren't dummy5

they . . . ?"

"And swords. And there are musketeers." Weston nodded.

"They charge each other with pikes . . . Christ! I can see that would be dangerous. It's a wonder there aren't more hurt!"

"Yes . . . but at the last moment they port their pikes—hold them up diagonally across their bodies—and then smack into each other."

Weston slapped his open hands together graphically. "And then they push like buggery until one side gives up. Or their officers break it off." Weston stopped suddenly. "But you say you don't want to hear this sort of detail yet?"

"Oh, I don't mind the technicalities." Audley glanced at Weston, unwilling to probe too obviously. What he wanted must be given freely or not at all, that was the essence of it.

"But what I still don't quite understand is why all this interested you. . . . That is, after you'd seen it. . . . I mean, so they were playing soldiers— maybe a little roughly. But that's all it amounts to: playing soldiers. The Americans have been playing their Civil War for years. And now they're busy playing the War of Independence. If you don't force people to wear uniforms they'll put them on of their own accord. At least, some people will. And so long as it's historical —so long as it isn't para-military. . . . You're not suggesting the Double R Society is para-military in seventeenth-century drag, are you?"

Weston stared at him in silence for a moment. "No, not dummy5

exactly para-military."

"What then?"

Again Weston said nothing for a few seconds. Then he shook his head doubtfully. "If I tell you I'll be helping you to jump to conclusions, that's for sure."

Audley shook his head. "I'm rather afraid I've already been helped to this one, so the damage is already done. But I'd be interested to find out whether it's the same one—and I'll make allowances for your prejudices, Superintendent." He smiled the sting out of the words. "So you went on the lookout for—ah—yobbos having a licensed punch-up. And you found . . . something more interesting, maybe?"

Weston pursed his lips. "To be honest, Dr. Audley, I'm not at all sure what I found—not yet, anyway." He paused, as though unwilling to commit himself. "Just let's say as a policeman I'm prejudiced against . . . politics."

So there it was, thought Audley: the confirmation of what Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon had encountered, passed on with all the caution and non-partisanship of the man in the middle, the good copper. There was an irony there which neither of the extremes could stomach, and against which they therefore blinkered themselves: to the far left Weston was a Fascist pig marked for the lamp-post, and to the far right a potential tool to be flattered and used; whereas in reality Weston's breed regarded both sides with equal contempt as it protected each from the excesses of the other.

dummy5

"Just so," he agreed sympathetically. "Not para-military so much as parapolitical. And what was it brought you to that conclusion?"

"They sang the wrong tune."

"I beg your pardon?" Audley frowned. "They sang—?"

"The wrong tune, aye." Weston gave him a grim little smile.

"Funny thing was, I almost missed it. Because, you see, I didn't really go on the look-out for yobbos. Or shall we say—I didn't expect to see any of my yobbos, not at that sort of gathering. Not quite their style, if you see what I mean."

True. Yobbos might, or might not, know a great deal about football, but it was unlikely that any of them would be able to satisfy the Double R Society's membership committees.

"Of course. I was forgetting—it was the casualties you were interested in. You wanted to see how they'd got themselves organised."

"That's right. And after I'd seen them fight their battle I was in two minds about packing it in and going home. I'd seen what I came to see. But then I thought . . ." he shrugged "... I was there, so I might as well see the whole thing out. See how they behaved off the battlefield when they'd had a few beers, talk to them and see what made them tick, and so on."

Thoroughness. The mark of the good copper.

"So I waited." Weston continued simply. "And as they marched off the field I heard them singing. One lot of Cavaliers were singing a dirty song, and some of the dummy5

Roundheads were singing hymns. But then there was this regiment at the rear, pikemen, all in red coats and steel helmets. Charlie Ratcliffe's regiment, it was."

"Yes?"

"They were singing The Red Flag, Dr. Audley."

5

THE police house at Standingham was a solid, red-brick dwelling, with a well-regimented garden which looked as though it was inspected twice a week by a superior officer who regarded weeds as law-breakers.

After dropping Digby outside it, Audley took the car forward a couple of hundred yards to the forecourt of the Steyning Arms, where it mingled unobtrusively with those of the pub's early evening drinkers.

He would dearly have liked a pint now himself, but that would have to wait. It was bad enough to allow the mere indulgence of his curiosity to rule his judgement, though if pressed he could argue that now, if ever, was the time to look the place over, before Ratcliffe could possibly be aware of his presence; but whatever the argument, it would be pointless to expose his presence to the public gaze without good cause.

And there was the rub, though: there was really no point in coming to Standingham now, if ever, and he was only doing it because Nayler's smug references to his "little television dummy5

programme" had galled him—the idea of Stephen Nayler squatting on any secret that interested David Audley was like an itch on the sole of his foot; he couldn't go on until he'd taken off his shoe and scratched it properly.

The sudden movement of the white picket gate of the Police House, for which he'd kept one eye cocked on the rural scene reflected in the car mirror, caught him by surprise. Sergeant Digby had transacted his business with remarkable despatch.

But then the Sergeant Digbys of this world would transact all their business smartly in their accelerated progress to the top, he decided, watching the young man's light infantry advance. The Good Fairy at the Digby christening had endowed that infant with every virtue necessary for success in the police service, except perhaps an extra portion of imagination. And even that, when one thought about it, might have proved more of a hindrance than a help in his superiors' eyes, if it had been granted.

"You've been quick," said Audley encouragingly.

"Had a bit of luck," said Digby breathlessly, jerking his head back towards the Police House as he spoke. "PC Cotton—I worked with him before he was posted here, when I was a DC, so I didn't have to mess around explaining things. And he knows this patch like the back of his hand."

"Including the castle?"

"You bet. Only two men there now. Caretaker-handyman—

name of Simmonds —for the inside, and old Burton the dummy5

gardener for the outside. Caretaker'll be there now, but Burton'll most likely be in there—" Digby nodded towards the Steyning Arms.

"Charlie Ratcliffe not in residence, then?"

Digby shook his head. "Doesn't fancy the place at all, apparently. He didn't even stay there when he was treasure-hunting— stayed at the pub most of the time. At least, stayed until the last two or three days before he found the gold—

then he must have camped on the site, Cotton reckons."

Digby paused. "All by himself."

"By himself?"

"That's right. When his uncle was alive there was a housekeeper and a trained nurse as well as the handyman and the gardener. After the old man died he paid the two women off and kept the men on. But when he came down to look for the gold he packed them off on holiday—told them to keep away until he sent for them. Which was about three weeks, Cotton says."

"So he found the gold single-handed, you mean?"

"He hired a tractor with a front scoop from a local farmer, but otherwise he was alone right up until the morning he announced he'd found the gold."

"A tractor?" Audley frowned. "It wasn't in the house, then?"

Digby looked at him in surprise. "Oh, no. It was in the kitchen garden, over by one of the gun-bastions along the north rampart—right out in the open, so Cotton says. He was dummy5

one of the first outsiders to see it."

"What happened, exactly?"

"That morning? Well, Ratcliffe had it all organised, that's for sure. The first thing Cotton knew about it was when Ratcliffe phoned him up, about ten o'clock. Cool as a cucumber, Cotton says. He simply said he'd found his family treasure, and would Cotton kindly telephone the local coroner because it was his job to take it in charge now, for the time being anyway. And he'd better phone his divisional HQ as well, because once the coroner had taken it then there'd be a security angle."

"And what did—ah—Cotton say to that?"

"He asked what the treasure consisted of. And Ratcliffe said it was gold, about a ton of it, give or take a hundredweight or two.

"He said that?"

Digby nodded, deadpan. "Cotton reckons he'd dug it up bit by bit over those three days, and then worked out exactly what he intended to do. Because by the time he got there on his bicycle there were a dozen of Ratcliffe's longhaired friends standing guard over it— he'd seen some of them drive through the village that morning, before the phone call. And he had others patrolling the grounds to keep people out as well, and they weren't there the previous day. Or not in the village, anyway."

"His long-haired friends?" Audley considered the dummy5

possibilities. "Meaning Ratcliffe's regiment of the Roundhead Wing, I take it?"

Digby shrugged. "I don't know. But . . . probably."

"So he kept everyone out of the castle grounds, did he?"

"Not everyone. He let in the people he wanted—he'd phoned a Sunday newspaper, and the others caught on double-quick.

Cotton says it was a nightmare, the next week or two, with journalists and sightseers. But when they found they couldn't get into the grounds unless they went in through the front gate they cleared off—the sightseers did, anyway."

Audley stared at the dashboard. Cool as a cucumber and bloody well organised, Charlie Ratcliffe had been, sitting day after day on a steadily increasing pile of gold ingots—and night after night, alone in the midst of his ancestral loot.

The gold of the Indies. King Philip's gold. Captain Sir Edward Parrott's gold. Colonel Nathaniel Parrott's gold. And then nobody's gold for over three hundred years.

And now Charlie Ratcliffe's gold by every law and every custom that made any sense. It was hard not to be on Charlie's side, even with the as yet unproved—and probably unprovable—suspicion that he had played most foully for it.

Because there was a much older and crueller law which applied to gold, a law which transcended every other one: those who had the guts to find it and the wit to keep it were its natural owners. Once it would have held force of arms as well as wit, now it took law as well. But unless Charlie dummy5

Ratcliffe could be proved a murderer public opinion would be on his side, no matter what his politics.

"But now there are only two of them looking after the place?"

"So Cotton says." Digby nodded. "It was a nine-days' wonder

—and apparently there's nothing much to see now but one damn great hole in the kitchen garden, like a bomb hit it. You won't have any trouble finding it, he says." He glanced shrewdly at Audley. "If you still want to."

There was nothing here for him— for either of them—

thought Audley. But Digby didn't know about the secret Nayler had dangled in front of him over the telephone, which was a private matter, having nothing to do with gold or politics or murder.

"I still want to—yes."

Self-indulgence.

"All right." Digby was deadpan again. "Cotton will go along to the house and talk to the handyman, and I'll go to the pub and talk to the gardener. That should give you a clear run for an hour or so."

The young sergeant had come to the same conclusion, that Swine Brook, not Standingham, was their only hope; and that this side-trip was either pointless or the product of some information which Audley was keeping to himself. If it had been Paul Mitchell sitting beside him there would have been signs of rebellion, or snide comments at the least; but Digby, mercifully, was better disciplined.

dummy5

"How do I get into the castle grounds from here?"

"Ah—now I've got you something that may help there." Digby produced a tattered booklet from his coat pocket. "I borrowed this from Cotton. There isn't any modern guide-book to the castle, because it's never been open to the public.

But there was this old Methodist minister who wrote a history of the place back in Victorian times, and there's a map in the back which shows the layout . . . it's a bit out of date, but the castle part hasn't changed—the village has expanded to the south, that's all, Cotton says—"

He opened the booklet carefully and spread out a dog-eared and yellowing map on his lap. "We're just about here—on the fold—on the north edge of the village by that dotted line. ..."

Audley studied the map. The village in the old queen's day had been huddled around the river crossing, with the castle on the hillside above—

"What's this other castle?" He pointed to the map.

"That's nothing. Or there's nothing there, anyway—that's the old castle site, it says," said Digby dismissively. "It'll all be in the book—this is our castle here, and you can get to the line of the old ramparts up that track beyond the pub there—" he pointed ahead across the car bonnet "—just by that bus stop.

If you follow the ramparts round you'll come to the kitchen garden on the north side, but you'll be out of sight of the castle all the way."

It was on the tip of Audley's tongue to suggest that he could dummy5

read a map as well as the sergeant, if not better, having been reading maps since before the sergeant was out of his nappies. But there had been nothing in the sergeant's voice except helpfulness, any more than there was nothing now but politeness in the way he offered the old guide-book once he had folded the map back into it. So perhaps young police sergeants naturally took senior Home Office officials to be doddering incompetents when it came to practical matters.

"Thank you, Sergeant," he said with equal politeness. "I'm sure I shall manage very well now."

Digby regarded him doubtfully for a moment. "Well, it's half-past now. Cotton can ring the caretaker, that'll pin him down.

And then I'll deal with the gardener in the pub."

"If he's there."

"If he's not, then he's on his way. Half an hour every night without fail, Cotton says, and I can make him stay longer.

Will an hour be enough for you?"

Five minutes.

Audley looked down at the venerable guide-book which, according to Digby, would answer all his questions about Standingham Castle.

The History of the Village and Castles of Standingham. By The Reverend Horatio Musgrave, BA, Resident Minister of the Methodist Congregations of Standingham, Worpsgrave and Long Denton.

dummy5

On the next page the Reverend Musgrave himself frowned up at him out of a luxuriant frame of hair and side-whiskers and beard, the very pattern of the late Victorian clergyman.

"The felicitous tranquillity of Standingham in our own peaceful and enlightened times conceals a sad history of fratricidal warfare and intermittent pestilence which cannot but provoke the reflection that the blessings of education and scientific progress, sustained and advanced as they have been by the proper study of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have conferred on the British Nation signal benefits which are nevertheless insufficiently understood by the generality of the population."

Evidently the Reverend Musgrave was determined to use his history to point a moral, if not to adorn a tale, in the best Victorian tradition. Which, in the circumstances of less peaceful and felicitous times, his latest reader might be allowed to skip—

"That same happy juxtaposition of highways and waterways in the midst of an industrious and prosperous agricultural community which has lately resulted in the extension of the Great Western Railway's passenger and goods services to the district served to identify the earliest settlement at the confluence of the rivers Irthey and Barwell as a place of some importance—"

dummy5

More paragraphs to skim across. Anglo-Saxon ploughman, marauding Danes, iron-fisted Normans with the tax-man's Domesday Book in their baggage, adulterine castles going up like mushrooms when the kings were weak—and coming down smartly when they were strong . . . the Black Death wiping out the original settlement beside the Barwell, and the new settlement beside the Irthey being burnt during a peasant rising . . . well, no one could say that the Reverend Musgrave was really exaggerating the horrors of everyday life in rural Standingham in the good old days—

"It was in the early fifteenth century that Sir Edward de Stayninge was granted the right to crenellate his manor on the ridge above the Barwell, on the site of the earthworks of the earlier castles; of which there yet remains not one stone upon another to testify the feudal pride before which the might of France crumbled at Crecy and Agincourt. For having espoused the cause of the wicked Richard Crookback, slayer of the innocent Princes in the Tower—"

Well, that figured. Because if there was one thing for which the lords of the manor and the villagers of Standingham alike could be relied on, it was to back losers. If there was a lost cause to hand, or a disaster of any sort going, then Standingham was first in the wrong queue; it was only to be dummy5

expected in due course that Sir Piers de Stayning, having lost the "e" off his name, should also ride to Bosworth Field in 1485 with the wrong army and lose the rest of it.

A cycle bell roused him from the contemplation of late medieval lawlessness to catch twentieth-century law in all its majesty: whether it was because of the price of petrol or from a wise return to old-fashioned police methods, PC Cotton's superiors had provided him with a bicycle rather than a car.

And for a bet, the sight of a large, properly-helmeted policeman on a tall bicycle moving steadily and silently round his patch under his own power did more to deter the local lads from petty crime than an anonymous car driver in a bus conductor's flat cap.

Just a couple more minutes of the Reverend Musgrave, then

—and he could finish the sad history on foot anyway . . .

"It was not until the second decade of the sixteenth century that a collateral descendent, Sir William Steyning, having secured the reversion of his uncle's estates, commenced the construction of the great house on the Irthey Ridge, across the pleasant open valley of the Willow Stream. Using stone from the castle ruins, he raised a residence in the Tudor manner which, though still taking the style 'castle', was yet an edifice at once more commodious and more comfortable than the frowning fortresses of earlier times, testifying both to the greater confidence of the gentry in their security of tenure and to the power of the monarch to impose his will on their feudal dummy5

ambitions. It was to be a tragic irony of history that this gracious home, with its noble aspect and high-mullioned windows, was to feature in the most famous and melancholy chapter in our brief chronicle of former days."

Audley shook his head at the text. It was maybe tragic, but hardly ironic that Standingham had received a bloody nose during the Civil War; the village was simply running true to form. Even the fact that it had been staunchly Parliamentarian, following its lord of the manor as so many places had done, and yet had still managed to ruin itself although Parliment had won the war, was a predictable occurrence. He could only hope that in reviving the family fortunes Charlie Ratcliffe had also reanimated the slumbering fiend who turned every Standingham event into a misfortune.

The track beside the bus stop sported a mouldering notice-board bearing the legend NO THROUGH ROAD, but, if the Reverend Musgrave's map could be relied on, it led nevertheless straight up the ridge to the old sallyport beside one of the bastions along the south rampart.

"Had the Lord of the Manor of Standingham been young and vigorous when King and Parliament parted from one another on the great issue of England's liberties in the year 1641, then he would dummy5

have assuredly have followed his inclination toward the banner of one or other of the belligerent parties—"

Very true. The Reverend Musgrave could no more resist stating the obvious than he could pass up the chance of using a ringing adverb or adjective.

"And, conversely, had he been old and unversed in the arts of war he would doubtless have stood aloof from the fratricidal strife which then ensued

—"

True again. So presumably the lord of the manor, Sir Edmund Steyning, had been neither young and vigorous nor old and unversed in the arts of war—

"But it chanced that Sir Edmund Steyning was neither."

Bingo!

"In Edmund Steyning, it might be said, piety and enthusiasm for the Protestant cause combined with a fiery and martial spirit which no physical handicap could altogether extinguish. From his dummy5

earliest manhood he had followed the drum, first under the veteran Dutch commanders in their long war against Catholic Spain and then under the greatest captain of the age, the veritable 'Lion of the North', King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, in his homeric struggle against the Imperial tyranny of the Holy Roman Empire on behalf of German Protestantism.''

There was no doubt where the Reverend Musgrave's sympathies lay. No doubt he had also thundered from his pulpit against Catholic emancipation in his own time, so he certainly wouldn't miss a chance of recalling the armed Catholic might of the Counter-Reformation—

"It was on the glorious field of Breitenfeld, when his hero and mentor smote the Catholic power, that the accident befell which ended Sir Edmund's active career. For, while attending to his duties with the Swedish field artillery which was a novel feature of Gustavus's army, he was desperately wounded by the premature explosion of a quantity of gunpowder. Although attended by the king's own surgeon, his life was despaired of for many weeks; and even when that indomitable spirit and iron will which sustained him throughout his life had triumphed over his injuries, it was in a body so shattered by war that no thought of further service could be entertained."

dummy5

The track levelled between two low brick walls. Peering over the parapet of one, Audley realised he had reached the line of the Great Western Railway's extension which had once been attracted by the Reverend Musgrave's "happy juxtaposition of communications". He was glad that the old Methodist minister was no longer alive to see the change which another century's educational and scientific blessings had wrought on the railway: its tracks had long since been torn up and young trees were already pushing their way up through the granite chippings. So far as Standingham was concerned, the railway age was as much part of bygone history as Sir Edward de Stayninge's crenellated manor.

"It was to his patrimony at Standingham that the crippled hero returned, from a Europe now wracked by the worst excesses of the Thirty Years'

War, which had reached its apogee in an unparalleled outburst of ferocity, unsurpassed since the fall of the Roman Empire, with the last vain and discredited attempts of the Papalists to impose uniformity on the unconquerable Protestants of the North."

Hadn't it been six of one and half a dozen of the other? Or was it that Musgrave had had to contend with a Newman-trained Catholic priest in his combined parishes? No matter

—

dummy5

"Yet even here, amongst the lush water-meadows of the Irthey and the Harwell, the stormclouds of war were gathering. Debarred by his physical infirmities from taking part in the events which preceded the English Civil War, Sir Edmund was yet not unaware of their genesis, which were borne upon him not only because of his staunch Protestant sympathies, but also because of the excesses of his Catholic neighbour, Lord Monson, ever a favourite with the Queen and her priests."

Enter the Demon King himself, good old Black Tom!

And here was another sign, a printed poster pasted on to hardboard: PRIVATE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE

PROSECUTED. To which, in an egalitarian spirit which Charlie Ratcliffe ought to have approved, someone had added BALLS with a red felt-tipped pen.

"It seems likely, indeed, that Monson's enmity and depredations, threatened in times of uneasy peace, had already animated Sir Edmund to plan that unique and formidable line of circumvallation which, even after the ruinous passage of two and a half centuries, yet remains for the discerning student of fortification to marvel upon; and which, with the aid of his willing and sturdy tenantry, he was to encompass so speedily when the war commenced."

dummy5

Audley looked around him. The Irthey ridge, which he had been steadily climbing, was now so heavily wooded that he had passed into the line of old Edmund's circumvallation almost without noticing it. But here, where the track passed through what had seemed like a natural cutting in the hillside, he had actually come upon what the Reverend Musgrave required discerning students of fortification to marvel upon.

Directly ahead of him was a pair of ancient wrought-iron gates festooned with rusty barbed wire and heavily padlocked. But the track had curved first round an isolated mound crowned now with trees, the roots of which straggled between the remnants of what looked like stonework. Except for the narrow beaten path up to the gates there seemed no rhyme or reason in the construction, though.

"One cannot but reflect with satisfaction on the surprise with which Monson and his be-ribboned cavaliers, flushed with their early successes, gazed upon the cunning defences with which Sir Edmund had girdled his property in their absence, and upon which they were to dash themselves in vain for two long years—"

Audley looked round again, and then retraced his steps to the point where the path had begun to sink into the cutting.

Cunning defences? If they were, then they were as confusing dummy5

as the Iron Age earthworks at the entrance of Maiden Castle, two thousand years older than Roundheads and Cavaliers, and their cannon—

Cannon?

He swung on his heel. Of course!—This had been the age of cannon, and he had been thinking foolishly of castles and towers!

That sudden steeper rise in the hillside wasn't hillside at all, but the earth shifted from the ditch ahead. A—what was the name?—a glacis, that was it.

And the mound in front was a ruined horn-work, with ravelins on each side of it, behind the counterscarp, and with the flanking bastions of the main ramparts ahead of him. He was in the middle of a classic seventeenth-century defence line, far in advance of anything the amateur soldiers of the English Civil War normally built, much more in the style of Vauban and the great French military engineers.

But, of course, Steyning hadn't been an amateur soldier at all, but a veteran of a dozen battles and sieges from the North Sea to the Baltic, who had learnt his trade from the great Gustavus Adolphus himself. There had been scores of others like him in both armies—men like Hopton and Waller, and the Scotsman Leslie—who had taken the same tuition, but they had all been fighting in the field, whereas Steyning had been caged by his injuries in his own great house in the middle of Royalist territory—caged with his Protestant zeal and his military know-how—

dummy5

And, by God, he'd been an artillery expert too, if the Reverend Musgrave could be relied on! So he'd done the only thing left within his power to do: he'd turned his home into a strongpoint, overlooked by his enemies until too late, so that no one had had the knowledge or the resources to dislodge him. Or the incentive either . . . until Colonel Nathaniel Parrott had descended on him with a ton of gold in his saddle-bags. And then—

"Indeed, Standingham Castle might well have endured all the shocks of war until Cromwell and Fairfax had crowned the Parliamentary cause with the laurels of victory, but for the malevolence of fortune which, by a singular coincidence, visited upon Sir Edmund a second and final disaster."

Audley glanced at his watch. The details of the second disaster would have to wait. A railing thickly encrusted with barbed wire now surmounted the rampart, but the beaten path he'd been following seemed to indicate that there was a way in to his right, among the trees.

He followed the path through a thicket of holly bushes until the way was blocked by a moss-covered tree-trunk. Where the tree had fallen there was a gap in the overhanging roof of leaves and also in the rampart above him: the fallen tree had grown on the very lip of the old parapet, and in falling had dislodged a five-yard stretch of it into the ditch below.

dummy5

Although the break had been long since plugged with a tangle of barbed wire, the abrupt end of the path and the regular footholds printed up the side of the bank of earth clearly marked the barrier as being weaker than it looked from below. But then the usual run of trespassers probably didn't wear good suits, thought Audley as he clambered up; this was the second time today that he'd had to negotiate barbed wire, even though the field gate on the ridge above the Swine Brook

—and Frances Fitzgibbon's spiked backside— seemed like distant memories.

When he reached the wire, however, he saw at once that its strength was an illusion, for the whole concertina was held in place by an unbarbed loop hung loosely over the twisted end of a broken railing: surmounting the cunning defences of Standingham Castle wasn't going to be such a problem after all, thank heavens!

He lifted the loop and stepped gingerly over the remains of the old railing. But then, as he was in the act of refixing the loop, he felt a sharp tug at his trousers, behind and right down by his heel.

Holding the loop in one hand and cursing under his breath at his clumsiness, he reached down to free the snagged material, only to encounter something warm and wet and soft.

There was something licking his hand.

Audley looked down into the eyes of a beautiful, half-grown red setter.

dummy5

The red setter grinned at him, gave an excited but perfectly friendly little yelp, and made as though to grab his trousers again: the discerning student of seventeenth-century fortification was being invited to play a game with an idiot dog.

Correction: an idiot bitch. A beautiful, half-grown, well-groomed, amiable and totally inconvenient idiot bitch of a red setter.

Audley's brain accepted the information. That the bitch was friendly was no surprise to him, because he was accustomed to animals liking him, even though he had no special affection to return. He had grown up in a household where there were only two kinds of animals: the ones which were eaten and the ones which worked for their living, guarding, mousing, pulling or carrying. He had never quite understood, when he became old enough to want to analyse their reactions, why they rewarded this unsentimental attitude with trust and affection, but he had had to accept the fact of it, that animals liked him. Maybe they just liked being treated like animals.

But it wasn't the setter's behaviour that mattered, it was the combination of her presence and her appearance. She wasn't just anyone's dog running loose in search of canine adventure: that shining coat had been brushed not long ago, and the little brass plate on the real leather collar shone pale with recent polishing.

dummy5

This wasn't anyone's dog, it was someone's dog. And the someone must be close at hand—and on the wrong side of the wire.

He dropped the loop into place and turned his full attention to the setter.

"Here, girl," he commanded conversationally, extending the licked hand for further examination. "Have a good smell, eh?"

The bitch strained forward towards the hand, first sniffing and then slobbering over each finger in turn, tail beating with excitement. When he was confident that she was sure of him Audley bent over her, slid his sticky hand over her head and eased the collar sideways so that he could read the name on the brass plate.

Burton, Castle Lodge, Standingham.

"There's a girl—there's a beautiful girl." He stroked the sleek head. "Aren't you a beautiful girl then?"

The bitch nodded at him, steadied and soothed by the sound and the touch. If only she could speak now she would have answered all his questions; instead she offered a dusty paw.

Audley shook the paw. "Pleased to meet you."

But where's your master, beautiful girl? Is this the way he comes down from the Lodge to take his evening pint? Is he close by now, beautiful girl?

The bitch cocked her head on one side, looked straight at him, and then looked directly over his shoulder.

dummy5

Audley straightened up slowly to give himself time to gather all his wits together, and then turned to look along her line of sight.

"Good evening," he said.

The setter's master was a tall, thin man with an all-weather face and an upstanding brush of grey hair less well-groomed than his dog's coat.

"'Evening."

A quiet-spoken man too, though his voice seemed to release the setter from Audley's spell: she leapt up the side of the gap and came to heel obediently at the sound of it.

"You've got a good bitch there," said Audley.

"Aye." Absently, without taking his eyes off Audley, the man—

Mr. Burton, I presume—reached down to touch her head, and she quivered with pleasure at the touch.

"Maybe a little too friendly with strangers, though," said Audley, smiling.

The grey brush shook disagreement. "Not usually. If you were a bad 'un she'd set her teeth to you, likely."

Well, that was a compliment. And if Burton trusted his dog's instinct perhaps David Audley should trust his own also—

and play to win when there was nothing left to lose. He was the wrong side of the wire after all, clear beyond the notice to trespassers.

He cocked his head on one side as the dog had done. "Oh aye? Then I take it she's left her mark on Master Ratcliffe dummy5

already then?"

For a long moment Burton considered him. Then one corner of his mouth lifted. "Would have done if I'd let her," he admitted.

Audley nodded, first at the man and then at the dog. He'd made the gesture and it hadn't been rejected. But the next move wasn't his.

Another moment passed. "You wouldn't be from a newspaper, I don't think?" It was more a reflection spoken aloud than a question. Or if a question, thought Audley, remembering his old Latin master, it was a num question, with the answer 120 built into it.

"No, I'm not from a newspaper. But I want to see what they weren't allowed to see all the same."

For a second or two after he had spoken Audley was afraid he had gone too far too fast. But instinct was still in charge, and instinct was all on the side of frankness now.

The man took a step forward and offered his hand. "Well then . . . you'd better come up out of there then, hadn't you?"

he said simply.

Help evidently didn't include conversation; Burton simply led the way along the path on the rampart, zigzagging between the trees in silence while the setter bitch rushed ahead in an attempt to discover the longest distance between two points. On their right the ditch was so choked with dummy5

undergrowth that the counter-scarp and glacis slope were almost invisible; on the left Audley caught occasional glimpses through the trees of the house itself, all windows and chimneys. On this south side it was quite close to the defences, he remembered from the Reverend Musgrave's map.

He could have found his way to the kitchen garden just as well on his own, and Sergeant Digby would be worried sick at Burton's failure to arrive on schedule, so this turn of events would have little profit to it if he couldn't persuade the man to talk. But however eloquent his agreement with his bitch—

that Charlie Ratcliffe was a bad 'un—he didn't look like a talkative man.

Audley quickened his pace. "You know Master Charlie well, do you?"

For a dozen paces Burton gave no sign of having even heard the question. Then, without pausing, he spoke over his shoulder.

"Not really—since he was a nipper."

Audley waited for elaboration, but none came. With a man like this, a man of few words, every word had to work an eight-hour day.

"He came here when he was young?"

"Aye."

"And not since—up until now?"

"Aye." Pause. "But he's not changed, though."

dummy5

That confirmed the record. Charlie hadn't really got on with either his cousin or his uncle, whose political and social persuasions were very different from his. He was the faute de mieux inheritor of an impoverished estate for which he had shown no love and in which he had shown no interest until very recently.

"What was he like—as a boy?"

Burton took another dozen paces and then halted. Half turning he waited for Audley to come alongside him. They stared at one another in silence.

"What you after, mister?" The question was as direct as the stare.

"Information."

"To cause trouble?"

No lies, thought Audley. Burton would smell a lie as quickly as his bitch smelt a rabbit.

"No."

Burton stiffened. "No?"

"The trouble has already been caused. And I didn't cause it.

What I cause isn't called trouble."

There was a rustle of leaves and the bitch appeared, summoned by the tension between them. She came to heel again precisely as she had done at their first meeting, and Burton reached down in exactly the same way to touch her head. It was as though there was a current passing between dummy5

them.

Audley reached forward, offering his right hand to the bitch again.

Lick or bite?

He felt the warm, wet tongue on his fingers.

"What was he like when he was a boy?" he repeated the question.

Burton nodded slowly. "Same as now. A chancer."

A chancer?

What was a chancer? Something more —or less—than an opportunist. A taker of risks, a twister—

"He never cared for nobody born, nor nothing made, nor nothing growed." Burton paused. "He never did, and he never will. Not till he's six foot under."

The bitch shivered at the pronouncement of this anathema and Burton swung back on to the path, releasing her and striding away. All the words he had to give on Charlie Ratcliffe had been said.

The trees ended abruptly on the ruin of a corner bastion and the rampart curved away along the crest of the ridge above open country. Audley realised that they had been following the contour line all the way round the spur of land on which the house had been built—having seen it he could no longer think of it as a castle, despite its name. And here, on the dummy5

northern and more open side—this must be the Reverend Musgrave's "pleasant open valley"—only the chimneys were visible.

And sure enough, there across the valley on the lower ridge above the Harwell beyond it, were the earth walls of the old castle, four or five hundred yards away. Obviously it had been built above the original village which the Black Death had wiped out; and built long before the days of gunpowder and cannon which made it a death-trap under any guns planted on this higher ridge. No wonder the Cavaliers had found this a hard Roundhead nut to crack! For, with the lie of the land to his advantage, old Sir Edmund had raised his glacis and rampart simply by moving the earth from the great ditch between them, leaving the ridge to do the rest of the work of shielding his manor.