War Game

Burton had stopped and was pointing along the rampart.

Audley took the guide-book from his pocket and opened the map. The walled kitchen garden was sited half way along the southern defence line, tucked behind "The Great Bastion".

Within it, right next to the bastion itself, was a small cross marked "The Memorial" . . . well, here at least the Double R

Society wouldn't have to expend any of its funds on a pious monument to the real thing. He turned back to the text—

"... a second and final disaster. For, having given shelter to a party of Roundheads led by his kinsman Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, a trusted dummy5

lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Edmund was more fiercely assaulted by the Royalists than ever before. By this time, however, he was reduced to casting his own ammunition with lead from the castle roof and making his own gunpowder with materials prudently laid in store; and it was while attending to the latter that he was killed in the explosion of a magazine behind the north wall."

Oh, careless Sir Edmund! Once might be called bad luck, but twice—well, that lesson ought to have been better learnt . . .

"History does not relate whether this misfortune was due to inadvertence or to a stray shot from the enemy, for there was none left to tell the tale; all that is certain is that he and his principal officers perished instantly in the ensuing disaster in circumstances and upon the very spot that are recalled by a monument raised by his posterity, Mr. Algernon Ratcliffe JP, esteemed father of the present Lord of the Manor, upen the two hundredth anniversary of its tragic occurrence:

"Stranger! Now gaze on gallant Steyning's urn, Who ne'er upon the foe his noble back did turn, But, Earth to Heaven, was untimely sent By fierce explosion. Mark the dire event!

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Once close besieged, now by dread

Death set free,

Lord, from Life's Battle take my Soul to Thee!

"Now, once again, we may observe the role of the hero in the divine plan, which the death of the noble General Gordon at Khartum in recent times must surely remind the reader. For, deprived of Sir Edmund's guiding hand and implacable resolve, the defences on that instant crumbled.

The great cannon being dismounted (which it had been his constant charge to play upon the foe), the enemy burst in upon the defenders at that point, scattering all before them. Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor of the explosion, took to horse and essayed to escape (and who shall cry 'faint heart'

or 'treachery' in such an extremity?), only to perish in the carnage which ensued."

The gold, thought Audley suddenly. Why was there no mention of the gold?

Burton waved at him again.

"Just coming."

"For sure it was that, as the holding of Standingham had been a great feat of arms, so was its overthrow the more terrible. In a letter to King Charles (who had furnished him with a body dummy5

of soldiers, together with siege armament), Lord Monson wrote: 'In the extirpation of this nest of viperous rebels above 200 persons were slain, and an hundred taken prisoner, mostly of the baser sort: together with a great store of plate and all manner of household stuff, together with gold and silver pieces, being the fortune of the late owner, to the value of 3,500 1., other than that taken by our soldiers, they being in the heat, of battle.'

Here it was that dark deeds were committed, it being rumoured that Colonel Parrott had brought with him a great treasure into the castle. But that brave man being beyond the power of his enemies to question, and certain poor prisoners revealing nothing, even upon torture, no part of this was ever discovered (giving rise to the legend which is even yet cherished by local folk); this even though much further damage was wrought to the fabric of the house and surviving buildings, the which was laid at Lord Monson's door, so that when he was shortly afterwards slain by a bullet through the mouth at the battle of Newbury it was said of him that 'he sought the gold and drank the blood of the godly in his life, but he found but one ball of lead and drank his own blood in his death'."

Nasty. The sack of Standingham had been nasty—the proportion of killed to captured emphasised that as no mere words could—and the exultation of the Godly Reverend Musgrave over Lord Monson's come-uppance was nasty too.

But what was certain was that Charlie Ratcliffe hadn't derived much use from the Musgrave History, because dummy5

Musgrave obviously rated the gold no higher than legend and rumour.

Burton was waiting for him beside an enormous cannon, Sir Edmund's original monster now bedded in a carriage of stone and set in the middle of the bastion between two pyramids of equally ancient cannonballs. But Audley had eyes neither for the man nor the gun, only for the kitchen garden behind and beneath them.

Killed in the explosion of a magazine behind the north wall—

But that had been over three hundred years ago, not the day before yesterday!

And yet there, directly below him, was a huge raw crater in the earth, surrounded by all the debris of an explosion: uprooted apple trees, dead in full leaf with the fruit hanging obscenely at unnatural angles, crushed rose bushes in bloom and piles of broken stone half buried in heaps of soil. Even beyond the area of total devastation the garden was scarred by wheel tracks which ran straight across flower beds and neat grass paths as though they hadn't existed. The whole place looked as though a battle had been fought across it, like the gardens of Normandy after D-Day. The fact that it had been a garden in full bloom, full of fruit and flowers, somehow made the scene more horrible; but what made it worse even than that was the feeling that the destruction beyond the crater had not really been mere carelessness, but a deliberate act, with each tractor journey cutting through a dummy5

different and hitherto undamaged area.

Burton read the stricken expression on his face. "Makes a man feel sick, don't it?"

Audley nodded. Sick was the right word. If a child had done this the stick would have been needed; in an adult, the psychiatrist.

"Did he hate you, from way back?"

Burton shook his head. "Didn't even remember my name.

Them, maybe he did . . . maybe he didn't. I can't rightly say."

"But they're dead."

"Aye." Burton surveyed the ruin of his work. "She loved flowers when she was alive, the old lady did. Roses and dahlias and chrysanths, mostly. And daffs in the spring . . .

filled the house with 'em. And after she died the old man kept them on. Said they reminded him of her, like." He stopped suddenly, as though he felt he'd spoken too much.

Audley stared down at the pile of stones. He could make out the top of a cross with one arm broken off short, and nearby lay an accusing fragment of inscription: MARK THE DIRE EVENT!

So that was the way of it: to get at the gold Charlie Ratcliffe had torn up the memorial to his ancestor with no thought of reassembling it afterwards.

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But that absence of piety in Charlie Ratcliffe was hardly surprising; what was surprising was that he had known exactly where to dig. And, judging by the depth of the crater, where to dig deep indeed.

I put myself into Nathaniel Parrott's shoes.

Hiding a ton of gold ingots presented a great many problems, the more so when it had to be done in the middle of a siege, with the garrison all around. For if Parrott and Steyning had decided that the castle was doomed they could hardly rely on death shutting all the mouths of those who might have an idea of the hiding place.

Although in fact death had done just that very neatly indeed.

Too neatly?

And, by God, death had also covered up the hiding place too, for this was the site of the original explosion—the site of the powder magazine.

Audley stared into the crater. Clever and devious and ruthless, Nayler had said, and they'd been all of that, Parrott and Steyning—all of that and more.

The powder magazine would have been strictly out of bounds.

They had dug their hole in it, and dug far deeper than was necessary.

And then filled it in.

And then made a brand new hole above it—and who would think of looking for a hole in the bottom of another hole?

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And they had killed the men who had hidden the treasure at the same time.

Audley frowned. The men had included Edmund Steyning himself.

Parrott.

"Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor among the senior officers, took to horse and essayed to escape

—"

The murderous bastard!

The murderous double-crossing bastard.

"You got what you came for?" The question was a formality; Burton had been watching him intently.

"Yes."

Like Nathaniel Parrott—like Charlie Ratcliffe: it had maybe taken a murderer to spot a murderer.

"That's good, then," said Burton.

Not really so good, thought Audley. There was nothing more here for him, on the scene of a successful seventeenth-century crime. If there was any chance of catching Charlie Ratcliffe it could only be somewhere back on the site of the twentieth-century crime, beside the Swine Brook.

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6

AUDLEY hated English heatwaves. He could put up with foreign hot weather, even Washington weather, which was natural and inevitable. But English heat was like a betrayal by an old and dear friend whose greatest virtue had hitherto been a comfortable and reliable moderation.

And worst of all was hot English darkness, which always made him wonder, when he awoke after a few minutes (or was it a few hours?) of sweaty, unrefreshing sleep, whether he was in England at all.

He reached across tentatively under the single sheet to reassure himself. There were only two thighs in the world like that. Once upon a long ago time there had been other thighs, but none of them had had Faith's superb temperature control, cool in summer and warm in winter.

He was at home in his own bed in the midst of a heatwave, with the weathermen's records melting one by one around him—

Not since the summer of 1948 ...

Not since the summer of 1940 . . .

Hot and dry.

But the summers of the 1640s, especially the summer of '43, had been warm and wet, which spelt poor harvests and bad, unhealthy military campaigns.

No more doubts now. He had been thinking of the summer of dummy5

'43 when he had finally drifted off. Now he would think of it again for want of anything better to think about.

Anno Domini One Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty-Three.

What had 1643 to do with 1975?

He felt the sweat running down his throat.

Nothing.

But that had been a bad summer for Parliament and the Roundheads, no two ways about that. Maybe not with hindsight, because even defeat was teaching Master Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax their new trade the hard way, the way Grant and Sherman had learnt it.

But without hindsight . . .

Beaten at Charlgrove in June, and that good man John Hampden dying in agony from his wound; beaten at Lansdown the next month by the Cornish infantry, and doubly beaten against the odds at Roundway Down a few days later by the Royalist cavalry.

Bristol, the second city of the Kingdom, stormed by Prince Rupert before July was out, and other towns falling like skittles: Poole and Dorchester, Portland and Weymouth, Bideford and Barnstaple— Henry Digby counting them off on his fingers across the dinner table—Gloucester in danger, Exeter on the verge of surrender, Lincoln and Gainsborough lost.

Trouble in Kent, trouble in London. And a rising even in Cromwell's own East Anglia.

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Plague in Waller's army—the warm, wet summer at work.

And John Pym, who held it all together from London, fighting the cancer in his gut that was killing him by inches and which would have him in the ground before the year was out.

Money desperately short, troops deserting for want of it—

Money. That was what 1643 had in common with 1975.

In 1643 Pym was already levying taxes such as Charles I had never dreamed of, taxes on everything but the prime necessities of life—and even they would be taxed before the thing was finished. Money not just for weapons and powder and soldiers' pay, but also to buy the Scottish army.

This wasn't Digby, this was his own memory. Digby knew about the battles and how they had been fought, but he didn't know what had brought the armies to the battlefield.

Money.

The Scots, to their credit, would fight the King for the sake of religion. But to their eternal discredit—and their subsequent utter defeat—they would only do it at a price and a profit.

"Darling—are you awake?" Faith turned towards him.

Money.

He knew there had been something bugging him about Swine Brook Field, and that was it. In August, 1643, both armies had been at full stretch, the Royalists to take Gloucester and the Roundheads to relieve it. But they had each detached dummy5

men they could ill afford to spare to intervene in a piddling little country house siege, little better than a feud between two local magnates who hated each other's guts because of an old lawsuit.

"Darling ..."

But if there had been gold at Standingham Castle—if money and promises would make the Scots march it would also make them stay north of the border. Was that what both sides had thought?

"Are you awake, darling?"

And since the King was far shorter of it than Parliament, that made it doubly important for Parliament to stop him getting it, even in the depths of their bad summer.

That was why Swine Brook Field had been fought.

Was that what Charlie Ratcliffe had thought too?

"Sorry, love. Did I wake you up?" He stroked the cool thigh gently.

"You would have woken me up if I'd been to sleep. You've been grunting and mumbling like a mad thing."

Audley felt guilty. She had wanted to talk and he had been too tired. And instead he had merely kept her awake.

"I'm sorry."

She gave a gurgling chuckle. "Oh, I don't mind you grunting and mumbling, darling. It's when you wake up and start thinking that you're really disturbing— you don't make a dummy5

sound then, and the noise is deafening."

"The noise?"

"You get tensed up when you think. You went absolutely rigid just now—did you have a brilliant idea? I hope you did, anyway. I don't mind being kept awake by brilliant ideas."

"Not exactly brilliant, but an idea." Audley smiled into the darkness: she was as irrepressibly unawed about his job as she had been when she'd first met him. And he was still what he had been to her then—a cross between a high class refuse collector and the municipal pest officer, two unrewarding but necessary posts. Someone had to fill them, and she just happened to fancy the someone who did . . .

"And top secret, I presume," she murmured.

"Not really. I was just thinking that the sinews of war are made of gold."

"Not very profound."

"But still true."

"Hmm ... if it wasn't just past midnight I might argue that ideas were better than gold."

"Ideas?" Audley squinted at the luminous hands of the bedside clock. It was only just past midnight: no wonder he hadn't woken her up, he hadn't been asleep for more than half an hour. And yet he felt as if he'd slept for hours. "All right, I'll give you gold plus ideas, that ought to be unbeatable."

"And that was why Cromwell was unbeatable? It was his gold dummy5

you were thinking about, I take it?"

She'd read the same story, only a day late and with more misprints, in the Guardian.

"But of course it wasn't his gold, was it?" she continued. "I mean he didn't find it, did he? That Charlie Ratcliffe must be a smart young man."

Bright, but not flashy—no, that was Henry Digby.

"I like your Sergeant Digby," said Faith suddenly, as though she'd been eavesdropping on his stream of consciousness.

"I'm half-glad you brought him here to sleep."

"Half-glad?" He wished he could see her face. "What does half-glad mean?"

"It means . . . that I enjoyed meeting him. He's intelligent and he has good manners. He's even quite good-looking in a homely sort of way."

"In America 'homely' means 'plain'," said Audley irrelevantly.

"Well, we aren't in America. Nice looking, then, if you want to play with words. You ought to introduce him to Frances, they're both the same sort of person."

"I might just do that some time. And that's the glad half of half-glad, is it?"

"Yes."

"And the unglad half is that he's in my equivocal company?"

She reached for his hand. "You're not equivocal. But he's very young, David."

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They were all very young, God help us. Mitchell and Frances and Henry Digby. And Charlie Ratcliffe too.

"It's a young man's game, love. You should be worrying about me."

The cool hand squeezed his hot hand. "I have to think that you can look after yourself, my darling."

Audley stared into the darkness for a moment without answering, holding the cool hand.

"He's a policeman, love. A policeman with three commendations too, and they weren't just for seeing old ladies across busy streets at rush hour either, you can be sure of that."

The hand relaxed. "So he takes his chances?"

"Exactly. He takes his chances. And since this is England and not Ireland, those are pretty damn good chances."

"Well, you just make sure they are, that's all."

"So you be careful of him . . . sir."

First Weston, now Faith.

Weston had said it twice though—

"You've got him for a week, the Chief said. Or ten days at the outside, that'll take in Easingbridge and Standingham.

After that we want him back—undamaged."

"Standingham? You mean there's a mock-battle there too?"

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Weston registered surprise. "They haven't told you much, have they!"

"I didn't ask for much. I get what I want in my own way and in my own time. Superintendent. Don't you do the same?"

Weston gave a non-committal grunt, then nodded grudgingly without replying. Audley was aware suddenly that he'd lost a part of the treacherous ground on which he'd built a bridge between them; at best it was a ramshackle, temporary affair, and without constant attention it would sink without a trace.

Yet here had to be a reason for this loss. "So there's to be a mock-battle at Standingham?"

Another nod. "Aye. A full-scale one. The Easingbridge affair's only a one-day stand, but Standingham's a two-day job."

"In honour of Charlie Ratcliffe's treasure trove?"

"I suppose so." Weston shrugged. "There's never been a re-enactment there before, anyway. The old man wouldn't have one at any price."

A full-scale two-day event. And in the ordinary course of things, a Civil War spectacle could draw a Second Division crowd, up to ten thousand people. But with the publicity Charlie Ratcliffe and the Cromwell's treasure had had . . .

plus the smell of unsolved murder drifting from Swine Brook Field . . . that might lift it into the First Division.

So Weston was apprehensive. Only it couldn't have anything to do with handling a First Division crowd, because when it came to crowd control the British police hadn't anything to dummy5

learn from anyone. And this was only a crowd of First Division size anyway, not of First Division disposition.

But still apprehensive.

"Will you be there, Superintendent?"

"At Standingham—yes. At Easingbridge—probably.''

"On the Ratcliffe case? So you're not giving up?"

"On a murder we never give up. We're running down the Incident Room, it's true. But we're not giving up."

No Statute of Limitations on murder.

And as murders went, this was still a young one. But there was something wrong with the way Weston had answered that question, a hint of weariness as well as wariness. Or vice versa.

So it came down to a straight question, delivered with no frills.

"You're not going to solve this murder, are you?"

Not even a question. If it can be done, they'll do it ...

"Meaning we're not going to charge anyone?" Weston paused. "No, we're not going to solve this one. Off the record."

"Off the record—understood."

"Thank you. . . . And neither are you, Dr. Audley."

And if they can't do it, I can't do it.

"Why not?"

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"Because this murderer's long gone." Weston stared directly at him, unblinking. "In my opinion. And also off the record."

Straight from the horse's mouth.

"Professional?"

"Professional." The answer came back so quickly that it had obviously been ready-wrapped and just waiting for collection.

"In your opinion. Off the record."

"Of course. There's no proof. No evidence." Weston showed his teeth in the travesty of a smile. "Seven thousand witnesses. Nearly five hundred statements. But no evidence."

Brigadier Stocker would have known that perfectly well. "Not a clever amateur? Or even a lucky one?"

"An amateur." Weston sniffed. "It's just barely conceivable, Dr. Audley. Very clever and very lucky and very daring. Or very stupid and very lucky and very daring. . . . Any thing's possible. But not probable."

"Especially as I'm here."

"You improve the odds, for a fact." The teeth showed again.

"But you didn't call them."

Audley drew a deep breath. "Thank you for trusting me, Superintendent."

"My duty to." Weston shrugged. "No more questions, then?"

"No more questions. I only had one that was worth a damn, and you've just answered that very fairly."

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Weston acknowledged the gratitude with a nod. "So what are you going to do now?"

"I wish I knew." Audley inclined his head towards the young sergeant. "Perhaps he'll have another flash of inspiration—"

They had moved towards Sergeant Digby then.

"Well, just you make sure he is, that's all," said Faith. "You just keep your eye on him. So long as you do that he won't come to any harm."

"Aye. And he won't do anything useful either—" Audley stopped suddenly.

"You've had another bright idea," said Faith accusingly.

"Mmm . . ."

"Well, have you?"

He'd have to go through the sergeant's evidence again.

"I don't know ... I was just thinking that someone else might have said much the same thing before the battle of Swine Brook Field a few weeks ago."

"And does that qualify as a bright idea?"

Bright idea. In the circumstances that was a joke he couldn't bring himself to laugh at.

"That's right. A little late, but better late than never." He turned back his corner of the sheet and sat up in bed. "And it's telling me to get up and make myself some black coffee."

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"But you've only just come to bed."

"But I feel as if I've slept half the night already. And I won't go to sleep for hours now, I'll just keep you awake, love." He leaned over and kissed her accurately on the lips. Cool lips, nice cool soft lips. A sensible man wouldn't get up and make himself coffee. But a sensible man would have explored this bright idea hours earlier, and this must be his penance. "I have to do some noisy thinking."

"Oh, very well—if you must." She yawned. "Just don't wake up Cathy. And don't wake up Sergeant Digby either."

He reached with his toes for his slippers, and with his hand for his dressing gown. Everything was exactly to foot and to hand in the darkness, with no blind groping. And no blind groping in his brain, either: he knew at last what he was doing.

Cathy's bedroom door across the passage was open, as always. In the soft light of the shaded 25-watt bulb outside he could see her lying under the sheet with the abandoned innocence of childhood, long legs and slender arms resting where they had fallen. That was how the dead on the battlefield lay, uncaring and oblivious of prying eyes.

Mustn't think of that now, he shook his head fiercely. Must leave her to her dreams, to pursue his own nightmares.

He stared past the sleeping child into the darkness of the open window beyond her. Somewhere out there lay Charlie Ratcliffe secure in the dreamless sleep of success.

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Dreamless until this moment, when a stranger bent his mind towards the tiny flaw in his otherwise perfect crime.

Now was the instant when Charlie ought to stir uneasily for the first time.

7

AUDLEY drew the crudely cyclo- styled pages of the Battle Scenario out of the plastic folder.

7. The battle will commence at 3.15 p.m.

He had left the pages in the wrong order, from the time when he had read them through quickly the first time, just before dinner.

Henry Digby had watched him in silence as he read, without any sign of expectation. And that had annoyed him a little—

that loyal assumption that he would get nothing more out of them than Superintendent Weston—and everyone else— had done.

But now, thanks to Faith, things were different. Now there were four names on his blotter.

Swine Brook Field: Battle Scenario.

Swine Brook Field: Murder Scenario.

—and it had annoyed him because it was correct. If there had been nothing here for Superintendent Weston then there dummy5

couldn't possibly be anything here for anyone else.

Only now, as he ordered the pages, he realised that he was smiling to himself. For now the game had changed. Or the rules of the game, which had shackled Superintendent Weston, had been abolished—that was the difference.

1. Roundhead Objective: to raise siege of Standingham Castle, or alternatively to deliver supply of artillery shot and to reinforce garrison.

Royalist Objective: to prevent above and to capture supplies for own use.

Of course it wasn't surprising that the Royalists too had been short of powder and shot after the siege of Bristol and with the siege of Gloucester in prospect. And as Digby had explained, they had been fatally short of ammunition at the battle of Newbury next month.

Unimportant.

2. Topography.: At the battlefield site the Swine Brook flows between two parallel ridges, with the Old Road to Standingham (ten miles distant) running beside stream, the course of which is marked by clumps of vegetation.

Audley closed his eyes for an instant, in an effort to recreate not what he had seen a few hours earlier, the ten-week growth which had sprung up since the Murder Squad had painstakingly cut back the bushes in a search for nonexistent clues, but the Swine Brook as it had been—

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"It wasn't like this, sir."

"No, Sergeant? Then tell me what it was like."

"Clumps" hadn't been altogether accurate. Except for the thirty-yard gap in the centre, where Digby had been stationed under one of the willow trees with his canisters of red dye, the tangle of blackberry and hawthorn bushes had formed an almost continuous and impenetrable hedge on each side of the stream—an overhanging hedge which met and interlocked above the water.

Members of both armies will cross the Swine Brook ONLY

between points x and y (see Map "A") . . .

In fact, members of both armies could only cross the stream in that gap, between points x and y.

Under Sergeant Digby's eye.

And then, on the far side, the farm track running beside the stream, and beyond it the field of wheat stubble, freshly cut and dotted with bales of straw.

But it hadn't been a stubble field then.

Members crossing the Swine Brook must NOT walk on the growing corn, but will keep STRICTLY to the track, where they will form up in regimental groups . . .

The Double R Society knew which side its bread was buttered; they were always very careful to keep in with the local farmers.

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". . . I see, Sergeant. So you were under this tree, pouring in the dye."

"Yes, sir." Digby wasn't overawed, just ten times as cautious as Weston had been. But there was no percentage in rushing him or pushing him, as he had pushed Weston. He had enough time at least to try to win the young man's confidence during the first twenty-four hours.

"A rather dull job."

"Sir?"

"A dull job, pouring dye."

"I was recovering from a sprained ankle, sir."

"Sprained in the line of duty?"

"Yes . . . sir."

And now a sprained tongue. It looked like being an uphill struggle, winning Sergeant Digby's confidence.

"But normally you would have been— ah—fighting, is that right?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you're an officer in Orme's regiment?"

5. Roundhead Army will muster on Barford Village Green by not later than 2.45. Order of march will be: Allen's Regiment, Clarke's Regiment, Bradley's Regiment, Orme's Regiment, Cox's Regiment, Seager's Regiment, Wheeler's Regiment, dummy5

Edward's Regiment, Ratcliffe's Regiment. Ms Anderson will assemble Angels of Mercy . . .

"Yes, sir."

Audley wondered what Ms Anderson would make of Ms Fitzgibbon on Saturday.

Unimportant. What was important was that Ratcliffe's Regiment—Charlie Ratcliffe's Regiment—was last in line of march, and therefore on the extreme left wing of the coming battle. Which, knowing Charlie Ratcliffe, was the appropriate place for them . . . but which also put them farthest away from where James Ratcliffe had met his killer.

"And where exactly was James Ratcliffe?"

Sergeant Digby pointed upstream. "About twenty yards from here, sir. I'll show you."

The trailing blackberry shoots and young hawthorn growth were fighting with the vigorous crop of stinging nettles at the actual scene of the crime. Death left no mark on the ground for one man, recently despatched, any more than it had for hundreds who had been once cut down all around. For a time the nettles would rule here, but by next spring the bushes would again be dominant, and within a year or two this spot would be indistinguishable from any other along the Swine Brook.

The Sergeant led the way to the edge of the stream.

"He was down there, tucked in right against the bank," he said simply. "Out of sight, practically."

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In the central gap the banks had been trampled down to the water's edge, but here there were miniature cliffs two or three feet high.

"There was a narrow opening to the brook here," explained Digby. "On this side, anyway—on the other it was solid brambles, four or five feet high."

"What was he actually doing here— James Ratcliffe?" asked Audley.

"He was in charge of two of the burning wagons. There were four wagons in all— old things we hired from the farmers—"

"To burn?"

"They weren't actually burnt. They were loaded with smoke-canisters, and it was the job of the special effects section to set them off at intervals."

"So James Ratcliffe was in the special effects section?"

"Yes, sir ... and he was also chairman of the Safety Committee, sir." Sergeant Digby closed his mouth on the last word as though he wanted to make sure no other words escaped custody.

Audley nodded patiently. "And just what does the special effects section do . . . when it's not making smoke without fire?"

Digby struggled momentarily with the question, deciding finally that there was no way it could be answered with a straight yes-or-no. "They set off small explosive charges mostly. Anything that involves any sort of danger, too."

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"Such as?"

Digby shrugged. "Falling off things. Falling into water . . .

that type of thing. They put up their ideas to the Safety Committee first, of course."

Audley saw suddenly that the sergeant was being pulled several different ways at once. As a good copper he didn't want to be unco-operative with a superior officer, even though in this instance the superior officer was a Home Office interloper. But as a uniform man attached to the CID

and to Superintendent Weston, who was also his future boss as well as his immediate one, he resented the interloper's presence.

But there was nothing unusual about that professional tug-of-war; what distorted the pull was a third force exerted by his loyalty to the Double R Society, at least so far as he didn't want the interloper to get the wrong ideas about its operations.

"I see." He nodded gravely, stifling the temptation to observe jocularly that James Ratcliffe's final "special effect" had been the most spectacular of all. "But this time he was just in charge of—ah—making smoke, eh?"

Digby gazed at him mournfully. "No, sir."

"No?"

"He was also one of the special casualties." Digby swallowed.

Understatement of the day. But rather than say that Audley managed a mild questioning grunt.

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"The special effects are laid on to ... interest the spectators."

Digby nerved himself to the required explanation with an obvious effort. "On this occasion Jim Ratcliffe led our attack

—the Roundhead attack, that is—on the Royalist line right in front of the crowd—"

7. The battle will commence at 3.15 sharp. (i) Roundhead vanguard fired on by Royalists blocking line of advance along Old Road . . .

. . . (viii) General assault by Roundheads with whole force except vanguard (still engaging road block force). Death of Colonel Flowerdew (Roundhead commander) . . .

Audley frowned. "I didn't know there was a Roundhead attack. I thought the Royalists simply charged, and that was that."

"Oh, that was in the original battle— the real one." Digby's voice lost its official flatness and became at once more animated. "We didn't set out to reproduce it accurately, it wouldn't have been possible because—well, it was one big cavalry charge, and we've only got six horsemen."

"And it would have been over too quickly."

"It would. And it would have been dull for the crowd, too. It isn't that we don't try to be accurate when we can, as far as it's possible without horsemen. But this was a case where we dummy5

had to give people something for their money—"

"And there's nothing like 'the push of the pike' for that, eh?"

Audley decided that a non-patronising smile would be in order. "So—Jim Ratcliffe led the attack. And became a

'special casualty'?"

"That's right, sir. He played the part of Colonel Flowerdew, who was hit by a cannon ball—he really was hit, in the real battle. We simply moved him up closer to the crowd so they could see what happened."

"When what happened?"

"When—he was hit by a cannon ball."

Audley lifted an eyebrow. "And that, I take it, was a special effect—being hit by a cannon ball? I can see that it would be!"

Digby grinned. "Only a small cannon ball. Not from a Saker or a Drake, but a Fawconet or even arabinet—a three-quarter pounder, say."

"Oh, sure." Audley grinned back, happy to have found this easy way through the sergeant's armour. "Just a very little one. But it wouldn't have a very little effect—special effect, I mean."

Digby's grin evaporated, as though he'd remembered suddenly that the discussion was not academic. "No. Blood everywhere. The crowd really goes for that, sir."

Very true, thought Audley. For crowds there was nothing like blood for money.

"So how do you give it to them, then?"

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"There are a number of different ways." Digby shrugged.

"The one we use is the simplest and safest. The casualty wears a loose linen tunic—white for the best effect —and white breeches too if possible. Anything that'll show the blood, anyway. . . . And under it are fixed several contraceptives—condoms—full of red dye and a bit of air to make them easier to burst. Actually, we've tried using balloons, but condoms are better."

But condoms are better: You Can Rely on Durex. Although this was one reliability test the family planners certainly hadn't thought of.

Only Digby was deadly serious now. And more, there was something in his manner which told Audley that it would be a mistake to burst out laughing.

Burst?

"How do you burst them?"

Digby shook his head. "There are some pretty dangerous ways of doing that. I heard of one fellow using explosive caps on a thick leather pad. But we use drawing pins in special gloves: the moment the cannon goes off—and you have to be not less than twenty yards away diagonally from it—you strike the chest hard with the palm of one hand and the back of the other hand." He stared at Audley with peculiar intensity. "It usually works well enough."

"But not this time?"

Digby continued to stare at him. "Then —you haven't read dummy5

my report, sir?" He blinked. "I mean—my statement in evidence?"

Audley shook his head.

"I see." The young sergeant paused. "Well ... it worked . . .

well enough—"

Well enough.

Audley stared out of his study window into the darkness, listening with one corner of his mind to the small dry rasp of the dead leaves on the terrace outside.

Suddenly his nerves tautened at the unnatural sound: there shouldn't be dead leaves moving like that in the gentle night breeze of summer. He half-rose from his chair before his brain relaxed the tension as instantly as it had arisen. The great elm across the lawn there was dying out of season, shedding its leaves for the last time like ten million other elms across the length of England which had been murdered by the invading Dutch elm fungus.

He subsided back into the chair, the knot in his stomach slowly untying itself. Whatever Matthew Fattorini might say, this wasn't the sort of job where the sound of dead leaves rustling in the darkness might not be what it seemed.

Well enough?

Such a beautiful, simple, professional killing, it had been. A pure, almost contemptuous best-laid scheme.

Colonel Flowerdew had died there according to plan on the dummy5

hillside above the Swine Brook, deluged in contraceptive blood to the admiring "oohs" and "aahs" of the crowd.

And Colonel Flowerdew had been carried away, back down the hillside, to where the wounded and dying lay.

And Colonel Flowerdew had then become James Ratcliffe, ready for his next special effect—

(ix) Royalist cannonade resumes. Roundhead wagons set ablaze.

Snugged down in his small gap in the bushes beside the stream he had set off the smoke canisters on schedule, one by one.

(x) Roundhead vanguard begins to retreat.

But now there came an unplanned addition to the Swine Brook Field Scenario—

Enter one murderer.

Identity unknown. Believed professional. Long gone now.

Route—in full view of seven thousand witnesses?

"He came down the stream, sir," said Sergeant Digby. "He couldn't risk coming upstream, because I was there, for one.

And nobody came past me until the rout started."

(xiii) Collapse of Roundhead defence—

"And too many people would have seen him—it's surprising what people see.

Whereas if he came down the stream—" Digby pointed.

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Audley followed the line of the finger, past the fresh growth of the cropped section of bushes, to where the uncut bushes raged in their unrestricted summer tangle. The stream issued out of a green-shadowed tunnel, walled and roofed with leaves and branches. The open fields on either side were parched and dry, and open to prying eyes, the well-grazed summer grass of the meadow on one hand and the evenly-cropped wheat stubble on the other; but the Swine Brook itself ran in a secret place of its own making, nourishing the deep rooted things which shielded it from the sun.

He caught the old familiar stream-smell of cool, damp earth and rotting vegetation, and the smell carried him back to his own childhood. He had explored streams like this a lifetime ago, searching for the shy things that lived and grew and died in hiding along the water's edge; the memory of soft wet moss under his fingers and smooth squidgy mud between his toes was there with the smell, long forgotten but never forgettable. . . . And the memory of the solitary little boy who had preferred such dark passages between the woodlands not only for the mysteries they concealed but also because of the invisibility they gave him.

Invisibility. No matter there were seven thousand pairs of eyes or seventy thousand on the ridge above, it would still have been easy for the killer to have stolen up on Jim Ratcliffe unnoticed.

"—somebody came down the stream, anyway. The mud was disturbed all the way to the farm bridge a quarter of a mile dummy5

upstream, in the spinney there." Digby pointed again.

"Couldn't make out the footprints, of course. Or anything else, except they were recent when we examined them. But someone came down and then went back again, and there's a road just the other side of the trees there. So it would have been easy, coming and going."

Easy?

"How did Ratcliffe die?"

For an instant the young sergeant frowned—no doubt Audley's ignorance of the simplest basic facts of the crime was still confusing him. Then he straightened his expression into formal blankness again.

"One blow on the back of the neck, sir. What the newspapers call 'a karate chop' now, but what used to be called a rabbit-punch." He paused. "Easy again—if you know how to do it."

Easy?

This time Audley's eye was caught by the wheat stubble.

Another memory there, but one much closer to the surface, for he could never pass a harvested field without half-recalling this one ... a memory half-golden, because time edged all youthful memories with gold, but dark also because time never quite succeeded in erasing the blurred recollection of unhappiness.

Not a child any more, nor even a snotty schoolboy though still at school, but a gauche youth . . . still lonely and introverted—the concept of the mixed-up teenager hadn't dummy5

existed then because no one had yet coined the word

"teenager": it had not been his brains which had saved him in that cruel society, but his accidental prowess on the rugger field.

Tackle him low, Audley!

No, that was the wrong memory leading him up the wrong cul-de-sac—it was the school harvest camp he wanted, the endless boring stooking of the sheaves in the National Interest.

And one particular memory, obscene and humiliating—

It had been just such a corn field in the first year of the war.

They had stopped stooking as the binder had come to the final cut in the centre of the field, fanning out in readiness for the rabbits trapped in the last of the standing wheat to make their break—and in the mad exhilarating chase he had driven one big buck right back into the cutting blades—

Kill it then, man!

One front paw gone, the other horribly mangled, the thing had suddenly come alive, the hind legs kicking with the strength of desperation.

Kill it, Audley—go on, man—kill it!

He had seen it done half a dozen times by the tractor driver, the grizzled man with the patch on his lung and the ten children. It had been a casual, matter-of-fact action: hold the hind legs and strike down with the edge of the stiffened hand.

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Rabbit-punch.

Easy.

Four times he had tried, his own increasing desperation rising to match the rabbit's, but failing to master it. Blood had spattered his trousers—why can't you die, rabbit?

Then the tractor driver had snatched it from him—

Give us 'un, then, for Lord's sake.

One quick professional chop. Then, for final measure, the man had stretched the twitching thing, legs in one hand, neck in the other. He could still hear that stretching sound, the small creaking noise.

Well, 'tis a good 'un, any road. You'm let the other best 'uns go.

From that dark memory to the banks of the Swine Brook, and now to the darkness beyond the study window, was a journey across years and hours time-travelled in a fraction of a second. . . . But he hadn't returned empty handed.

There was the short answer to Weston's off-the-record certainty and young Digby's word for it.

Not easy.

Because it wasn't so easy to kill a rabbit with one blow, and a man was bigger game and another game altogether. It wasn't simply that they had eliminated all the costumed battlefield actors who'd been playing at killing—he could afford to take dummy5

that for granted now, the hundreds of statements checked and cross-checked. This was a killing, and more than that, a neat and tidy killing, which was another thing and a very different thing. Because for all the popular claptrap, not one person in a thousand could guarantee to do that with one blow. That guarantee was the hallmark of the professional.

It had been Digby's qualification that mattered—

Easy—if you know how to do it.

"I see. He came down the stream—that's the hypothesis. And he hit Jim Ratcliffe once—that's the forensic fact?"

"Yes, sir."

"And Ratcliffe was crouching in his gap in the bushes beside the stream—here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Behind the smoke he was most conveniently making. . . .

And then?"

Digby pointed. "Ratcliffe was struck down here, sir. Then his body was rolled over the bank—" he pointed again "— there."

"Hypothesis?"

"Fact." Digby took two steps. "And he was found in the water

—there. Fact."

Audley peered over the edge of the bank. The motion of the water was imperceptible, it was like a millpond. At this point, where the Swine Brook flowed out of its tunnel in a gentle dummy5

curve, the stream had formed a shallow pool behind a miniature dam built with fallen branches and plugged with the accumulated detritus lodged in them by the winter floods. Over the years those same floods had carved the overhang at his feet, through which the feathery roots of the bushes trailed in a curtain towards the surface of the water.

In its original state, with the tangle of thorn and bramble all around, this would have been a fine and private place to tuck a body, no doubt about that.

"Ratcliffe was lying right under the overhang, sir." Digby seemed to have read his thoughts. "I didn't actually see him until I was standing right on the edge, where you are now exactly."

No need to elaborate on that. Rolled over and then tucked in out of sight. No one who had fallen, or been pushed or knocked, would ever have come to rest so tidily, virtually out of sight in the shallows. That had been the killer's risk, but one taken coolly to minimise the greater risk of quick discovery and maximise the chance of a trouble-free getaway.

And a small risk at that, because only Sergeant Digby's trained eye would have spotted the dividing line between horrid accident and suspicious circumstance. And only Sergeant Digby, of all people, would then have fortified his suspicions with established police procedure—

Protect the scene of the crime.

Much more likely, even if the body had been discovered sooner rather than later, would have been these destructive dummy5

moments of chaos which usually attended presumed accidents. People milling around in panic or ghoulish curiosity, moving the body, trampling the place flat and obliterating any shred of evidence or circumstance that there might be. With only a little luck here on Swine Brook Field—

with a battle going on nearby and seven thousand spectators poised to stampede down the hillside—there wouldn't have been any scene of the crime left by the time any sort of trained observer reached the spot. And then, with just a little more luck, there might not have been any crime, just an unfortunate but comprehensible accident of the sort discerning coppers like Weston had foreseen.

But a little luck had gone the other way for once, in the presence of Sergeant Henry Digby.

And doubly the other way. . . .

Audley frowned. "Why did you come here and look, Sergeant?"

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

Audley realised that he had been staring down into the still pool so long that the Sergeant had moved away from him.

"I'm sorry. . . . You were on station down there—" he pointed towards the clump of willow trees "—and then you came up here to look for Ratcliffe. Why did you do that?"

Digby stared at him for a moment. "But it wasn't to look for Ratcliffe, sir. It was because of the dye—"

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Such a curious thing, utterly unforeseeable, had made the best-laid scheme go agley. In less fatal circumstances a joke, and even now a piece of the blackest comedy.

The durability of Durex contraceptives.

It seemed likely, thought Audley, that James Ratcliffe had practical experience of their resistance, for he had taped no less than eight of them to his body, four at the front and four at the back, when the explosion of any one in each place would have been sufficiently effective to simulate death by cannonball.

Would have—and had been. For he had been carried out of the battle with most of them still intact, still loaded with air and red dye, and it had taken the spikes of the hawthorns and brambles against which he had fallen and over which he had been rolled to puncture the rest of them.

Dye on the ground, where he had fallen.

Dye on the edge of the bank, where he had been rolled.

And most of all dye in the Swine Brook itself, the tell-tale stain of which had eventually carried its message downstream to Sergeant Digby, who of all people happened to be the one best trained and disposed to read it.

"It was because of the dye—coming down from above where I was putting it in. So I knew somebody was playing silly buggers upstream from where I was."

"Why should that matter?"

dummy5

"If it was the same stuff I was putting into the water it didn't matter, because that was non-toxic. But there are dyes and dyes. If there was some idiot adding a toxic chemical to the water there could be hell to pay downstream, where farm animals drank from it—it could have cost the society a fortune in damages. That's why I went to find out double-quick."

"I see. So you came to this gap first and found Ratcliffe in the water straight off?"

"Not straight off, sir. But I saw traces of the dye on the ground, where the contraceptives had burst. And the whole pool was red by then."

Blood everywhere. And not a drop spilt. "That must have given you a nasty shock."

"It gave me a shock when I looked over the edge of the bank and found Jim Ratcliffe, I can tell you, sir."

Audley nodded. "In what you rightly took to be suspicious circumstances?"

The sergeant lifted his hands in an oddly uncharacteristic gesture of doubt. "Well, sir ... it wasn't quite as cut and dried as that. I had to make sure as far as I could that he was dead first. There's—there's a routine for this sort of situation."

"Of course." Audley watched the young man closely. "Yet your suspicions were aroused very quickly, were they not?"

Digby's jaw tightened. "Yes, sir."

"Because of the way the body was tucked in under the bank, dummy5

and the blobs of dye on the ground where he had fallen —and so on?"

"Yes, sir." A muscle in the young man's cheek twitched nervously. "I believed there was a possibility of foul play."

"And not ... an accidental blow with the butt of a pike, say.

During the rout?"

Digby steadied. "The body was in the stream before that."

"But that would have been . . . only a matter of minutes. How can you be so sure?"

Without a word Digby bent down and plucked a handful of dry grass from the edge of the pool. Then he leant over and dropped the handful into the water under the overhang.

"Watch, sir," he said simply.

Audley watched. For a few moments he thought the grass was stationary. Then, almost imperceptibly, it began to move upstream: here, in the still pool above the natural dam of winter debris there was a lazy backcurrent. Whatever entered it was carried in a slow circle, round and round, until it sank or was caught by the band of accumulated scum at the lip of the dam.

Digby followed his glance and pointed. "The stream doesn't go over the top there, you can see—there isn't much water coming down, with the drought we've had, and there wasn't then either. It just seeps through underneath."

Audley eyed the drifting grass, substituting for it in his imagination the thread of dye which would have unwound dummy5

from Ratcliffe's body in the sluggish movement of the water.

And as it unwound it would have spread until the stain filled the pool . . . and only then would it begin to sink to find the chinks in the dam . . .

Not just sharp, but bloody sharp. Almost too bloody sharp to be true, was Sergeant Digby.

"How long did it take to reach you, then?"

"Not less than fifteen minutes." There was no sign of doubt and nervousness now. "And fifteen minutes before I found the body the rout hadn't started. Nobody broke ranks before the final attack, either —I know, because I was watching. And that was the way it was planned, too."

"Planned?"

"That's right. The first two attacks, the dead and wounded were carried back to the stream. But after that they lay where they fell—for effect . . ." Digby trailed off, momentarily embarrassed.

Audley studied him for a few seconds, then turned back towards the pool. "And you took one look, and smelt a rat—

because of the time factor . . . that's what it amounts to, does it?"

The muscle twitched again. "You could say that, sir—yes."

"I am saying that, Sergeant. If it had been after the rout you might have put it down to accident, but before the rout you weren't so sure—is that it?"

"I couldn't see how it had happened when it did happen, yes dummy5

sir."

"Good." Audley lifted his gaze back to the sergeant. "Well then, Sergeant, I'd be obliged if you'd tell me how the devil you knew there was a time factor at all?"

"Sir?" Digby frowned at him.

Audley hardened his expression. "How did you know so much about the behaviour of the stream?"

Digby relaxed abruptly. "Oh—that."

"That, yes."

"Because we don't leave anything to chance, sir." Digby smiled at him innocently. "When we stage a battle we do it properly. ... So I gave the dye a trial run a week before, to find the best place for it, and I tried this pool first because the gap here was more sheltered than the one downstream.

But it took too long—and it spread the dye too much." He pointed downstream. "What we needed was for the water to be good and red where Black Thomas was due to drink it, and still pink when it reached the road bridge where the crowd could see it. So in the end we decided on the big willow as the best place."

"We?"

"The Special Effects Section . . . sir," amended the sergeant politely.

Good boy, thought Audley. If you have to kick the top brass, always kick them politely.

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"I see. And everyone knew about this, I take it?"

"It's in the battle scenario, sir— Appendix F." Digby nodded.

"Everyone has to know exactly what's happening, otherwise things are bound to go wrong. We've learnt that by bitter experience. So you see—"

Audley smiled into the stillness of his study, remembering the sergeant's meticulous account of the battle of Swine Brook Field with admiration.

Such a curious mixture, that account had been. Mostly it was still the formal recollection of a policeman trained to give evidence, but every now and then the youthful Civil War buff shone through, illuminating a sombre landscape of fact with shafts of enthusiasm.

He thought of Digby lying in the narrow bed in the spare room at the end of the passage, which had once been his own childhood bedroom, and realised without surprise that the thought was already edged with something close to affection.

It was hard to think of the boy as a police sergeant. If he had married young he could have had a son that age, and Digby could have occupied that bed as of right. To have a sharp son like that to put him in his place would be rather agreeable. . . .

He was growing old, and the measure of his years was that he was already beginning to relive his youth through those who still had the whole exciting game to play . . . and who could dummy5

still do all the things he had somehow missed doing.

Neither Faith nor Superintendent Weston needed to worry: he would keep an eye on young Henry Digby. A protective eye.

And the irony now was that in that very responsibility lay the key to the murder of James Ratcliffe on Swine Brook Field, which Weston and Digby himself had both missed.

The red dye—the tell-tale red dye—had been an unforeseen accident. But Henry Digby's presence twenty yards from the killing had been a well-known fact. A fact well known to Charlie Ratcliffe.

A fact Charlie Ratcliffe could not afford to overlook: Sergeant Digby of the Mid-Wessex Police Force.

He stared down at the four names which he had written on his blotter.

8

ON the corner of Easingbridge Village Green nearest the Ploughman's Arms public house a yellow-coated musketeer was vomiting up his heart and a quantity of beer, oblivious of his admiring audience of small children. Two of his comrades, obviously in little better condition, lay stretched out on the grass nearby, their muskets and bandoliers at their side. And from the pub itself came the sound of drunken, but nonetheless distinct singing—

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Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair?

Parlez-vous, parlez-vous!

Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair, With lily-white tits and golden hair?

Inky-pinky parlez-vous.

Audley manoeuvred the 2200 into a vacant slot in the pub forecourt, reflecting as he did so that if the song was anachronistic ("Three German Officers crossed the Rhine", which as he recalled was its first line, if not its title, could hardly be earlier than 1914), the condition of the singers was no doubt historically impeccable: from the position of the village on the western slope of the Easing valley, with the river between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell's advancing raiders, the cavaliers must have been stoned out of their minds to let their enemies round them up so easily in broad daylight back in 1644. Mere incompetence couldn't stretch that far, only booze would answer the case.

He switched off the engine and picked up the leaflet which had been thrust through his window at the traffic jam by the bridge. It was crudely printed, but the map on one side told its story simply and directly: Cromwell, the cunning sod, had feinted at the bridge to draw the Royalists' attention directly dummy5

across the river while actually sending the greater part of his brigade up river to cross by a convenient ford. Once across the river, his men had swept down on the enemy's flank; whereupon the attackers at the bridge had advanced in earnest and had turned the Royalist defeat into a rout.

It all looked nice and clear-cut; suspiciously so, indeed. But the reality had probably been very different, he thought, remembering what Captain (alias Sergeant) Henry Digby had told him that very morning. This had actually been the future dictator's very first truly independent command, the raid to stop the King transferring his artillery from the Severn Valley to Oxford. If he had fluffed it, the odds were that he might not have been given his chance as Fairfax's second-in-command in the coming campaign—the Naseby campaign which made his reputation as a cavalry general.

By the time he'd reached the Easing valley he'd already fought two successful actions, smashing three of the Earl of Northampton's regiments in Oxfordshire and then bluffing the Bletchingdon House garrison into surrender. But he still had everything to play for, and it would all have gone for nothing if those Royalist pickets at the upstream ford had been made of sterner stuff.

He stared down at the crumpled paper in his hand, at the black arrow which marked the line of the approach march, the river crossing and the flank attack. So that was how it had been done.

Old Cow Ford.

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It wasn't even a proper name—more likely it had been just

"the old cow ford near Easingbridge". But that was where history had been made—and changed— nevertheless.

Sweating, muddy horses and sweating, swearing men filing through the thick woods above the valley; jingling harness drowned by the distant sound of musket fire and cannon downstream, and maybe also diverting the attention of the Royalist pickets—"The buggers'll be catching it down by the bridge. Better them than us, though"; and then the terrible long cavalry swords drawn, the straight basket-hiked swords of the New Model Army . . .

And then General Cromwell's men were across the Old Cow Ford. And General Cromwell was on his way to the Cotswolds

—and to Naseby, and the Palace of Westminster and the conquest of three kingdoms.

Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke, foolishly believing a false report that Cromwell had been defeated and slain by Lord Goring, allowed his men to partake of a great quantity of fresh-brewed ale, so that on the morrow they were in no condition to withstand the onset of the Ironsides, when they came upon them untimely—

The black and white of the pamphlet registered. So he'd been literally and absolutely spot on with his first guess: in executing his flank attack (which, if it was well-advised, was still no great military innovation), God's Chosen Instrument of Vengeance owed more to the stupidity of his adversary than to Divine Providence, which usually received the credit dummy5

for Crowning Mercies in those far-off days. Though perhaps the presence of that "great quantity of fresh-brewed ale" was in the nature of Divine Providence at that, constituting as it did a temptation which no British soldiers—and above all no English cavaliers of the seventeenth century—could be expected to resist.

But no matter. If there were such things as omens, it was a good omen that his instincts were working. And perhaps even a good omen twice over: Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke had joined the great company of defeated commanders because he had thought himself in the clear, had relaxed his guard, and then had been stampeded into the wrong counter-action.

And that, more or less, was the battle scenario for the defeat of Charlie Ratcliffe at this instant.

A crash of broken glass within the Ploughman's Arms, followed by a loud cheer, roused him from his military reflections just as a dark shadow loomed in the corner of his eye outside the car.

"Are you all right, sir?"

The dark shadow was a large policeman.

"Perfectly, thank you. Why shouldn't I be?"

The policeman sniffed suspiciously. "That's not for me to say, sir. But I've been watching you for the last four or five minutes and—"

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There was another loud crash from the Ploughman, and a further outbreak of cheering which blended into the unforgettable strains of "The Ball of Kirriemuir". The policeman, who was young and fresh-faced and astonishingly like Sergeant Digby, lifted his nose from the car window and gave the pub a long, hard look as though calculating the breaking-strength of its structure under internal pressure.

The distraction gave Audley a moment to gather his wits. He had been sitting hunched down, slumped as though asleep, outside a pub where a great quantity of ale, fresh-brewed or otherwise, was being consumed—slumped in a car.

He was therefore about to be breathalysed.

"You should be worrying about them, not me, officer." He smiled up at the young constable.

"Sir?" The candid eyes fastened on him again.

"I said—you should be worrying about them."

"They aren't in charge of cars, sir."

Trust the police to get their priorities exactly right. Good on you, copper!

"Of course." He passed up his identification card. "I'm on official business, officer . . . and, for the record, I haven't had anything to drink, either."

The eyes scanned the card, checked the face against the photograph, scanned the card again.

"Thank you, sir." There was no change in the voice as the dummy5

card came back through the window; a potential offender against section umpteen of the Road Traffic Act was no different, until breathalysed, from one of Her Majesty's servants on his lawful occasion. "Can I be of assistance in any way?"

"I'm looking for Bridge House—Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth.''

"Just on down the road, sir. The big stone place directly overlooking the bridge —you can't miss it."

"I see—thank you, officer." Audley reached for the ignition.

"But you'd do better to leave your car here, sir. I'll keep an eye on it. The yard at Bridge House is full of horses."

"Full of—horses?"

The constable nodded, deadpan. "That's right, sir. The Royalist cavalry— it's their headquarters. But it's only a step from here."

Audley couldn't prevent himself from looking across the gleaming new cellulose of the car bonnet towards the Ploughman, from which some of the more esoteric verses of

"Kirriemuir" were now issuing.

The young constable caught the look.

"That's all right, sir. Your car won't come to any harm. I shall be here until they close."

I shall be here. A pub full of well-oiled soldiery, armed cap-apied, but I shall be here.

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The constable grinned. "It's just high spirits—they don't make any real trouble. It'd be more than their lives are worth if they did, their own people 'ud court martial 'em double quick. And with me out here . . ." He shook his head. "No trouble at all."

"And no one drunk in charge of a horse?"

"Cavalry don't drink, sir—they're very strict about that."

"And the infantry?"

"No car keys. They collect all the keys and label 'em the night before, and the general has 'em under lock and key. And they put up a £50 bond with the publicans, for broken glasses and such like ... so the only thing they've got to worry about is running out of beer." He shook his head again. "Much better to let them let off steam. And they'll all be sweating off the beer this afternoon, anyway."

Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth was a tall, very thin, stooping old man, with washed-out blue eyes and short, untidy grey hair that stood up at the back as though he had allowed it to dry in the wrong position and had forgotten to brush it.

As soon as he had established to his own satisfaction that Audley was who he claimed to be he gestured him into the long, shadowy hall of Bridge House with curious jerky movements of a hand the fingers of which were crooked into a permanent arthritic claw, fussy imprecise movements which made it difficult to imagine that the same hand, strong dummy5

and supple with youth, had once wrestled a bomb-laden Lancaster into the air.

"Up the stairs, up the stairs . . . right to the top, right to the top—door in front of you, straight in front of you, white door, brass handle—waiting for you there. Ringside view, too."

Audley wasn't sure what "ringside view" meant, but that would no doubt reveal itself beyond the white door. In the meantime he had the young constable's courteous example to guide him.

"It's extremely good of you to give us house-room, Air Marshal." He paused with one foot on the bottom stair.

"We're very grateful."

With an effort the Air Vice-Marshal straightened up and looked Audley in the eye. "No need to be. Been thanked already—by a pretty girl too, what's more. And I expect Tommy will send me a proper bread-and-butter letter on expensive notepaper in his own good time . . . which reminds me: there's a plate of sandwiches up there if you haven't had any lunch, granddaughter cut them. And a few bottles of beer ... but you tell Tommy it isn't necessary—save the cost of a stamp, and God knows they cost enough now. . . . No need at all, glad to be of service for a change. Besides, makes life more exciting—battle outside and cloak and dagger inside—

real cloak and dagger too, by golly." He cackled briefly at whatever the joke was and then waved the claw again upwards. "Don't keep them waiting —up you go. Right to the top, remember —white door straight in front of you."

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Audley fled up the stairs. The Brigadier's Christian name was Thomas, yet he had never in his life heard anyone refer to him as "Tommy". Even Sir Frederick, in moments of rare camaraderie, had never gone further than "Tom", but presumably the Air Marshal dated from some unimaginable time when the Brigadier was a pink and scrubbed subaltern.

Always supposing it had been the Brigadier who had pulled the string and opened this particular white door with the brass handle. But whoever it was, it was a piece of "old boy"

expertise such as Audley loved and admired. Good for Tommy, whoever he was!

Bridge House was lovely, the more so as he climbed: up from the coolness of the hall to the light of the first-floor landing, white doors everywhere and sunshine streaming in through the tall windows. For a moment he felt quite euphoric, with the warmth and the whiteness and the good omens—and the intelligence that Brigadier Stocker had once been "young Tommy" to everyone, and still was to someone.

Then the shallowness of the euphoria steadied him.

Arrogance was his besetting sin, he knew, because those who loved him were always warning him against it— arrogance that was fathered on pride by boredom. But arrogance had never betrayed him, all the same; it had been his passion for secrecy which had come closest to doing that, half a dozen years or more back, in the aftermath of the June War. And if that was another great sin it was at least the occupational sin of his work—and he had paid for it in full over the years since dummy5

then.

But what threatened him now was smug self-satisfaction, which wasn't so much a decent, God-fearing sin as a mean little weakness. His battle hadn't even started, and he was already trying Cromwell's hat for size when he ought to be worrying about his feet fitting Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke's boots.

White door, brass handle.

It was the playroom—and the children were playing in it.

Children in fancy dress, under the disapproving eye of their tutor.

Grown-up children.

What hit him first was their beauty: they were both beautiful as they never had been before.

Paul Mitchell was a good-looking young man, he had always known that, though without remarking on it. But Paul Mitchell the cavalier, in loose light-rust tunic and dark-rust breeches, with exquisite cobwebs of white lace cascading over his shoulders, at his wrists and even falling over the tops of his soft-leather calf-length boots, wide yellow taffeta scarf at his waist and broad-brimmed hat, ostrich-plumed, on his flowing hair—this Paul Mitchell took his breath away.

This Paul Mitchell was beautiful.

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And Frances—

Where Mitchell was a blaze of colour and elegance, all velvet and lace and embroidery, Frances Fitzgibbon was total severity, starched white cap and collar, cut square and sharp, and a voluminous black gown censoring every curve beneath it.

And yet Frances too was beautiful now; and also in a new way which suited her as the old way had never done.

Which suited her—

That was it, of course: they were not dressed up at all, any more than they were children at all—for all that Mitchell sat astride a huge old Victorian rocking-horse and Frances knelt before a marvellous Victorian dolls' house. They were changed —even their expressions were different: they stared at him with the heavy-lidded calm of Van Dyck's portraits—

but they had changed from strangers into themselves as they really ought to have been.

Panache for Mitchell.

Purity for Frances.

Mitchell rose effortlessly from the rocking-horse, checking its movement with a long-fingered hand. It was the first time Audley had ever noticed how long those fingers were.

"Steady there. Champion—steady," Mitchell commanded.

"Well, my lord, how do you like us?"

Before Audley could reply Mitchell swept off the broad-dummy5

brimmed hat with an exaggerated figure-of-eight movement, ending with its plume brushing the floor as he completed the elaborate ceremony of a seventeenth-century bow.

"Where be thy manners, my lady?" he hissed out of the corner of his mouth at Frances. "Show the Lord General proper respect, I pray you."

Well— fiddlesticks would be her quick answer to that, thought Audley. There was no nonsense about Frances Fitzgibbon.

Frances looked at him doubtfully for one fraction of a second only, then lowered her eyes modestly and sank into a deep curtsey, her black skirts billowing up around her.

"My lord—forgive me. I bid you welcome."

So ... but if they were playing games, damn it—and they would never know how unsettling their games were after that eerie first impression—then it would be as well for him not to lose his temper straight off.

"Thou hast my forgiveness, child." He bowed to her.

Mitchell straightened up, squinting at him in the sunlight. "I pray you, my lord, to be not short with us. We do but—ah —

practise those strange usages which thy command hath thrust upon us. By our words thou must needs know the problems that beset us in this enterprise."

"Aye." Frances had the grace to blush, and that was at least something to hold on to. "We, being persuaded in the love of Christ that thou hast ordered us rightly, have purposed to the dummy5

utmost to serve you in our places and our callings. But thou needest not reply to us in like manner."

" 'To serve thee'," corrected Mitchell. "You is wrong."

"But they do say you."

"Only in the plural, at least colloquially." Mitchell shook his head emphatically. "But that bit about 'the love of Christ' was good—absolutely right for you—thee." He turned to Audley.

"The bloody trouble is, I don't know how to swear any more.

I just don't know how to say 'Fuck off ' in these clothes—I'm darn sure they said it somehow, and I've already wanted to say it a couple of times. But I'm a trooper—and I don't know how to swear like a trooper."

"They weren't singing like seventeenth-century troopers when I last heard them," said Audley. "It was strictly twentieth-century stuff, ex-British Army."

Mitchell nodded agreement. "Ah—they make an exception with the songs. It's the spirit that counts there, not the words."

"Same with us," said Frances. "It's Hymns Ancient and Modern."

"And political," said Audley.

"That's right—" she gave him a quick glance "—but you know about that?"

"Not nearly enough yet. So tell me more." What had ever made him think she looked sexy? As a puritan maiden she was not every man's mistress, but every man's daughter.

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"Well, I've only had one evening of it. As far as I can see there are three regiments to the far left—the others call them 'the Angry Brigade'—but I haven't found anyone making bombs yet. It's just talk."

"What sort of talk?"

"Oh, the usual stuff, but all in seventeenth-century language." Frances fished in a small leather bag, producing a mini-recorder. "I went to a camp-fire service last night, down by the river—on our side of it. And there was one chap sounding off—listen—" She held the recorder to Audley's ear, clicking the button with her thumb as she did so.

Crackle— crackle— crackle—

"I couldn't get as close as I'd have liked—"

"Yes, I tell you all, good people ... the liberties of this land have been lost since the coming in of William the Conqueror . . . and that, ever since, the People of God have lived under tyranny and oppression worse than that of our forefathers under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance is at hand; God will bring His people out of this slavery, and restore them to their freedom in enjoying the fruits and benefits of the earth ..."

Crackle—crackle—crackle—

The voice was high and nasal—an American voice. ... A New England voice.

"That's the American—Davenport— isn't it?"

"That's right. Bob Davenport— Preacher Davenport, they call dummy5

him."

". . . to make it fruitful for the use of man. And the time will surely be—I tell you, my comrades—my brothers, I tell you all

—when all men shall willingly come in and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this community of goods."

Frances clicked the button off. "That's about as much as I could get of that. But it was all much the same—new stuff in old bottles." She gestured from herself to Mitchell. "Dressed up like us."

Like them? Well, she was half-right there.

"Not new stuff." Audley shook his head. "That's the genuine article, word for word—pure seventeenth-century revolutionary communism. It's the Thoughts of Gerald Winstanley—'Digger' Winstanley. His big idea was that you can only achieve a political revolution through a social revolution, not vice versa."

Mitchell laughed. "I can't see Oliver Cromwell going on that much, any more than we would have done."

We? Mitchell was certainly identifying with his fellow cavaliers, no doubt about that.

"He didn't," replied Audley. "They put him down damn quick. . . . What else have you got on Davenport, Frances?"

She shrugged. "Not a lot. He puts over his stuff as though it just came into his head. And he's strictly non-violent—he'll preach all day, and help the wounded out of the battle too, but he won't carry a pike."

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"The word is 'trail'—'trail a pike', murmured Mitchell. "So Davenport is one of our possibles, then?"

"He is, oddly enough."

Frances frowned. "How did you come up with him? He doesn't seem quite the type for subversion ... in so far as there is a type."

"You may well be right. It's just a hunch I'm starting on, there's no evidence to back it yet so far as I know."

"What sort of hunch?"

"Maybe hunch isn't the right word— assumption might be better. An assumption of what precautions I would have taken if I'd hired someone to knock off James Ratcliffe the way it was done at Swine Brook Field."

He had them both with him in the twentieth-century now: the Van Dyke aura was fading visibly.

"Go on, David," said Mitchell.

"It's nothing very special. As a matter of fact, the police thought of it too and checked it out as far as they could. . . .

The killer obviously had very exact inside information about the place and the timing. So he obviously had precise information about the people as well."

"Charlie Ratcliffe did, you mean," said Mitchell.

"What people?" asked Frances.

"Henry Digby, for one," said Mitchell quickly.

Trust Mitchell for that, thought Audley. And trust him also to dummy5

sit on it until he was good and ready.

"Henry Digby—exactly." He nodded. "If I was going to kill a man just twenty yards from a young police sergeant in front of thousands of people I should want to make very sure he was minding his own business."

Mitchell nodded. "Very true. I should want him tied hand and foot for choice."

"I'm with you there," said Frances.

"Well . . . I've gone over Digby's evidence twice, and there are just four people who attracted his attention at the material time—or distracted his attention, as the case may be. He was talking to two of the mock casualties, Philip Gates and David Bishop." He looked questioningly at Frances.

"Don't know them." She shook her head. "The names don't ring any bells, anyway, not among the Angry Brigade people I've heard of yet."

"They wouldn't be in the Angry Brigade. I don't know what the Roundhead Wing would call them, but according to Digby they were Labour Party moderates from the way they spoke."

"Ah—well, they'd probably be Militiamen. Sort of ... well, moderate English Presbyterians. Meaning good Parliamentarians, but they don't want to get rid of the monarchy—would that be about right?"

"Spot on, exactly. And they hadn't much time for the Ironsides either, Digby said."

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"That would be them." Frances nodded vigorously. "Militia regiments—there are half a dozen of them."

Mitchell sniffed disparagingly. "I'll never get the hang of your motley lot, Frances dear. In our army, we're all good King's men, and we're nearly all Church of England, and we're all good Conservatives. And that's that."

Frances smiled sweetly at him. "It's just a rumour about the Fascists, then?"

"Slander, more like. Got a few Monday Club supporters—

quite good chaps. And some Roman Catholics, of course.

Also good chaps. But nothing really weird, like your Tower of Babel. . . . Which, as I say, I don't really care to understand at all."

She lifted a black and white shoulder. "Well, you must be dim, Paul dear. Parliamentarian Presbyterian equals Labour Party—plus one or two Church of England left-wingers, who are Social Democrats. Then there are the Independents—

they're the Communists—"

The light dawned on Audley in a blaze of understanding.

Oliver Cromwell had metamorphosed into Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, none other. And that meant—

"—the Communist Party, anyway. And all the rest are the non-conformists: the Anabaptists and the Fifth Monarchy men and the Diggers and the Levellers and so on—they're the Trotskyites and the Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists and the Revolutionary Workers." She turned towards Audley. "I dummy5

don't know really how they number off with each other yet—

they can't possibly fit each other historically— but that's more or less how they go."

No, they could hardly fit exactly, thought Audley. History never repeated itself so neatly; technically Cromwell's own Independents had included all the rag tag and bobtail of the religious sects that the Puritan revolution produced like fleas on a mangy dog—

Fleas on a mangy dog ... He closed his eyes for an instant as the words struck a chord in his memory, and was back in Cambridge half a lifetime before in Highsmith's sitting room

—

"... like fleas on a mangy dog. But if you learn them, my dear David, you may at least impress the examiners even if you never impress anyone else. Baptists and Anabaptists; Brownists and Barrowists; Anti-Trinitarians and Anti-Sabbatarians— they're all listed in Masson's Life of Milton—

Antinomians and Famulists; Divorcers and Seekers; Soul-Sleepers and Millenaries; Sceptics and Atheists; Ranters and Quakers—how the Quakers got into such company heaven alone knows, but at least they managed to get out of it; and the Muggletonians—I've really never been able to establish what they believed. And then there was Cromwell himself, but he took an agreeably pragmatic view of everyone other than Episcopalians and Catholics: 'If they be willing faithfully to serve the State, that satisfies'. And if not —when the dummy5

Levellers tried to subvert the Army, for example—he clapped them straight into the Tower of London. ... Or shot them.

'You have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you'—for which devastatingly simple pronouncement the University of Oxford promptly conferred on him an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law, my dear David. ..."

"David!"

Audley woke with a start to find them both staring at him:

"I'm sorry. I was just thinking. ..."

"There were these two Militiamen," prompted Mitchell.

"They distracted Digby while James Ratcliffe was having his neck broken."

"Distracted, possibly. They certainly talked to him, and one of them even restrained him, or tried to. Philip Oates and David Bishop."

"Do you want me to look them over?" asked Frances.

"Just keep an eye open for them. Colonel Butler is running a full check on them for me at the moment. And on Robert Davenport too."

"Where does he come in?"

"He was also on the spot at the right time. He preached a sermon on the wrath of God and the wickedness of the Royalists."

"He's always doing that."

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"Yes—but apparently this was a particularly good sermon.

Digby couldn't resist listening to it."

"Which was what Davenport intended him to do, you mean?"

Audley spread his hands. "It's another possibility."

Mitchell nodded. "And the fourth distractor?"

"Ah, the fourth is a long shot—and one of yours, too."

"Mine? You don't mean he's a Cavalier? A Royalist gentleman?"

"He is indeed. And not just any Royalist gentleman, either.

Have you met Major John Lumley yet, Paul?"

"Major John—? You're kidding!"

"Alias Black Thomas Monson of Swine Brook Field—not at all."

"You're still kidding. Never in a thousand years," Mitchell shook his head vehemently, "not in a million years, either.

Not John Lumley."

"A long shot, I admit. But as Black Thomas he made a special point of telling Digby to keep on pouring his red dye into the stream. And Digby says that simply wasn't necessary."

"So he was just making sure Digby did his job, then."

"Precisely. And if I was Charlie Ratcliffe's contract man that's the one thing I'd require of my employer: to ensure that Digby went on doing his job while I did mine. So Lumley stays on the list until we can prove otherwise."

"A waste of time." Mitchell's tone was obstinate. "Gates and dummy5

Bishop—maybe. Davenport—probably, from the way he talks.

But John Lumley—never."

"What makes you so sure?" asked Frances.

"I also happen to have met the man himself and I know how his mind works. And it would never work on behalf of Charlie Ratcliffe, not ever."

"Maybe." Lumley was the longest shot of the four, but in the circumstances the more suspects he had, the better. "You may well be right, Paul. And if you are, then he'll emerge whiter than white from Colonel Butler's inquiries, and I shall be perfectly happy to accept his verdict."

"And if not?" said Frances.

"Until I hear from Butler in a few minutes' time that's academic. They may all be clean . . . they may all be dirty. But at the moment they are all suspect and we're going to lean on all of them and see what happens. That will be when you must keep your eyes skinned."

"Hmm ..." Frances frowned slightly. "Talking of keeping our eyes skinned . . . there are several rather equivocal non-Roundhead types who've been loitering around the camp from the minute we arrived yesterday evening. And asking questions too, evidently."

"That's right. They've been lent to us by—some of our friends."

"Well, they're not exactly treading with fairy feet."

"They aren't meant to be. They're just softening up the dummy5

targets."

"Which include Charlie Ratcliffe, I trust." There was a faint echo of his anger in Mitchell's voice, as though the slur cast on Major Lumley constituted a large addition to Charlie Ratcliffe's overdue account.

"Don't fret, Paul. We've been leaning on Ratcliffe since early yesterday morning."

"How?"

"He's been trying to raise money—and quite a lot of it, too—

on the strength of his golden expectations," Audley began.

Frances stirred at that, her long skirts rustling. "That wouldn't be for the new printing press of his own he wants for The Red Rat, would it?"

"That—among other things." Audley looked at her with interest. "Where did you hear that?"

"Oh, it's all over the camp. And what's more, the word is that his old printer has got wind of it, so he's dunning Ratcliffe for all the money he owes, and Charlie's running round in circles." She stared back at Audley shrewdly. "You wouldn't be behind that, by any chance?"

Mitchell laughed softly. "What—queer a chap's credit, and then stir up his creditors with nasty malicious rumours? Do you really think David would do a thing like that? Perish the thought!"

No one could fault Brigadier Stocker for speed as well as judgement, reflected Audley. The word was not only out, but dummy5

it was moving in directions they hadn't expected, like the smell of Stalky's dead pussy-cat under the ceiling joists.

"Yes . . . well, he is finding money tighter all of a sudden," he admitted. "That is, tighter than a young man with great expectations ought to find it." He turned towards Mitchell.

"Which brings us to your gold, Paul."

The cavalier face twisted. "And don't I wish it was! Two million, two and a half million, I could rub along on that. It makes you weep."

"Finders keepers, losers weepers," murmured Frances.

"Finders is right. And as for weepers . . . yes, I should think the King of Spain must have dropped a tear or two when the Conception never showed up."

The sound of a distant drum, a brief, brittle tattoo beaten by a single drummer, echoed through the open dormer window from across the valley. Audley could see small figures with tall pikes assembling in the gap where the road down to the bridge cut through the skyline. Someone was waving a flag with the sweeping theatrical gestures of a Tyrone Guthrie production.

"Nothing to worry about," Mitchell reassured him. "The war doesn't start until three o'clock. In fact it can't start without me anyway—I'm galloping back with the news of Cromwell's approach."

"Well, what's all the fuss up there for?" Audley pointed.

"They don't trust each other," said Frances.

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Audley frowned. "What d'you mean?"

"She's right—we don't trust each other." Mitchell leant out of the window, staring downwards to the left. "Here . . . look down there by the bridge."

He drew back to let Audley take his place. The line of the little river was thick with trees and even from the high window the heavy foliage of summer concealed whatever might be happening beneath them. But in a gap between two immense chestnuts he could see the bridge itself, and the cluster of Royalists who guarded it, heavily armed with muskets and beer tankards.

He turned back, still frowning. "I still don't understand."

Frances made a face. "I told you, David —they're weird. They have these strict rules, and on one level the whole thing's a childish game. But ... I don't know . . . on another level it isn't a game at all. I get the feeling that what they'd really like is to play it for real, with real pikes and real guns. And that one day that's what it will be."

Audley nodded slowly. "I see. And the side that starts first wins—hence the pickets on guard?"

"I don't know. They would say that it's just a convention—

and it gives the crowds a kick to see that they're taking precautions against a surprise attack. . . . But it's more than that. It's not simply that they don't trust each other. They don't like each other."

Audley's eyes were drawn to the window again as another dummy5

drummer started drumming, this time from the Royalist lines. He was beginning to understand the full implications of Superintendent Weston's unease: under the cloak of seventeenth-century history the Double R Society seemed to have managed to break the rule that politics must never put on a uniform. To haul any of these people up in court, where they could always take refuge behind their historical knowledge in their ludicrous seventeenth-century language, would make the law a laughing-stock. But here they were, drilled and organised on the divisive basis of late twentieth-century politics nevertheless.

But that was Weston's problem. Or, if there really was anything in it, he could pass it on himself to the Minister as an addendum to his final report; there might well be something for the lawyers to get their sharp little teeth into in those political questions the membership committees had put to these children of his. In the meantime he had other fish to fry.

He looked at Mitchell. "Tell me about Ratcliffe's gold, Paul."

Mitchell relaxed into a frayed old cane chair beside the rocking-horse. "Not Ratcliffe's gold, David. The King of Spain's gold, for my money—the property of His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip IV."

"Spanish gold?"

"Oh, no. Not Spanish gold—American gold. Or, to be strictly fair, Spanish-American gold. The gold of the fabled Indies."

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"You mean there's scientific proof for that?"

"I do—and there is. The BM let one of their metallurgists loose on it, and he had himself a field day. I can't honestly say I understand all his jargon, but the burden of it is that you can fingerprint gold like everything else. Some of the differences you can see with the naked eye. Apparently it ranges from deep gold-yellow to yellowish-white if there's a high silver content. But the real scientific clincher is the minute traces of other metals—all sorts of weird and wonderful elements are present in its natural state, according to where it was mined. Even with the modern stuff there are ways and means of narrowing down the source, like whether it comes from the Urals or South Africa. And with pre-1850

gold, when refining techniques weren't so sophisticated, it's even easier.

And this is pre-1850."

"Oh, sure. The comparison tests don't pin down the age more precisely than that, but it's definitely Spanish-American, mostly from Peru and Colombia, with a bit of Mexican from Sonora and Chihuahua probably."

"Any stamps on it?"

"Stamps?" For a moment Mitchell looked mystified. "Oh—

die-stamps or whatever ... no. But then the ingots are pretty crude, not even to any standard weight, which suggests that it was melted down again to remove whatever official marks there were on it originally."

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"By Edward Parrott, you mean?"

Mitchell shrugged. "Edward or Nathaniel, your guess is as good as mine. But Edward for choice, I suppose. It isn't at all difficult to melt gold, but he wouldn't have had much time to do it in '43 and I doubt whether Spanish royal mint marks would have worried him very much, either, come to that. ...

So more likely it was Edward." Mitchell's white teeth showed under his moustache for a second. "A very warm man, Sir Edward. He knew his gold was hot, so he heated it up again—

if you'll pardon the puns."

And a very warm young man, Paul Mitchell, too. There wouldn't be much by now that he didn't know about 1643, his insatiable curiosity would have seen to that.

"But then, again, it could have been Nathaniel who did the reheat," went on Mitchell. "I've talked to a chap who was a vet in the Army in Burma in '45—1945, that is. He actually knew more about mules than horses and ponies, but his estimate of how much a Dartmoor pony can carry for any length of time comes to the average weight of any eight of Charlie Ratcliffe's ingots, almost exactly. Which is a thought, you know. . . . Not that it accounts for Charlie's brilliant original detective work, of course."

"And have you got any leads on that?"

"A little." Mitchell's tone was smugly casual. "You know the BBC's doing a TV programme on it?"

"In 'The Testimony of the Spade' series, yes. BBC Two."

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"Ah, well I'm told things have hotted up now. It's rescheduled for peak viewing on BBC One. They've got a Cambridge Don by the name of Nayler as link man." Mitchell looked sidelong at Audley. "You wouldn't know him by any chance, David?"

Too casual by half, that question.

"He was up at the same time as I was."

And too casual by half, that reply, damn him!

"I rather thought so."

"Have you spoken to him, then?"

"Have I spoken to him?" Mitchell's lip curled and suddenly he was all seventeenth-century again. "Professor Bloody Nayler was my tutor for one brief —mercifully brief—period.

Even if I crawled to him—which I don't intend to do—he wouldn't give me the time of day." Amusement slowly displaced cold anger. "I'm relieved to see that you dislike him as much as I do. But why the hell didn't you drown him in the Cam when he was a puppy?"

"Get to the point, Paul."

"The point?" The glint of amusement went off abruptly. "The point is that other people dislike him equally. So a girl I know in the BBC was quite happy to show me his draft script—and talk about what's not in it yet."

"And what is ... not in it?"

Mitchell sat forward. "Nobody knows— yet. But Ratcliffe and Nayler have cooked up a deal between them, that's for dummy5

certain. What's in the script at the moment is their joint version of how the gold got to Standingham—Nayler's constructed most of that and Ratcliffe is going to give him the credit for being a clever fellow. But that's all just scene-setting for the big stuff, which is going to be filmed in situ next Saturday, when they re-enact the storming of Standingham Castle. Charlie's going to explain, blow by blow, what a clever fellow he was, and Nayler's going to stand on the sidelines and say 'Here! Here!' and 'I told you so' at intervals. But that's all under wraps at the moment—the producer doesn't like it, but he knows he's on to a hot news story so there's nothing he can do about it with Charlie and Nayler ganging up on him."

"But surely they know what happened during the siege—and at the storming?" said Frances. "I mean, I've heard people talking about it in camp already."

"They know the facts about the siege and the storming, sure.

But not about the gold and how it was hidden." Mitchell swung back to Audley quickly. "It wasn't hidden in the house, that they do know. It was out in the grounds somewhere, apparently right out in the open. And he did go straight to it, like the papers say; he dug pretty deep before he hit on it, according to information received. The place was like a ploughed field when he'd finished."

Audley nodded. "But how does all this help us?"

"It doesn't, at least not yet. But my little BBC girl had one very interesting bit of scuttlebutt—in fact she thinks she dummy5

knows how Charlie got on to the gold. Or at least how he was so sure it was there when everyone else said no. Because she did the routine research on Charlie himself— there's going to be some scene-setting stuff about his Maoist-Leninist revolutionary background, he's insisted on that. This is gold for the people, is his line—not gold for Charlie Ratcliffe. And he's going to spend it in the service of the people."

"Well, it makes a change from booze and women and fast cars," conceded Frances. "Except the people to Charlie are likely to be revolutionary people, I suppose. The Marxist heavenly host."

"Too right! But the point is that one bit of Charlie's background has been edited out of the record, ostensibly by Nayler because the script was running too long. But my girl says Nayler passed it and Charlie cut it out himself. And it's the exact bit of Charlie's past I've been looking for all along—

the moment when he first met his long-lost ancestor Nathaniel Parrott. Which was a case of like meeting like, I suspect; there's no surviving portrait of Nathaniel, but if there was I've a hunch it'd be a dead ringer of Charlie Ratcliffe looking down on us."

That was very possible, thought Audley. Families erupted with genius, and then slept for centuries, as the Churchills had done between the first Duke and the appearance of Jenny's Randolph and her young Winston; no doubt they could do the same with the more uncomfortable qualities shared by Nathaniel Parrott and Charles Neville Steyning-dummy5

Ratcliffe.

"I don't know what you're driving at now, Paul," said Frances.

"No?" Mitchell glanced quickly at Audley. "You disappoint me, Frances."

It wasn't Frances who disappointed him, of course: it was that he had failed to get the same response from teacher.

With someone less self-confident than Mitchell a bit of that sort of encouragement might have been in order, but it would do no harm to let him see that he'd have to get up earlier in the morning to catch David Audley in bed.

"What he's driving at is that Charlie Ratcliffe's interest in his ancestral treasure —and in the English Civil War—is of rather more recent vintage than he suggested to the Press. Is that it, Paul?"

"More or less." Mitchell nodded cheerfully enough. "It's all in the Ratcliffe file, Frances—David's quite right, it's not much of a dossier, but it does have a few facts. Including that he didn't join the Double R Society until about a year ago. And, come to that, he didn't read history at college either, it was sociology."

"Surprise, surprise," murmured Frances.

"No surprise, I agree. But it all adds up to a little terminological inexactitude—he was lying through his goddamn teeth. If he was so taken with the war he could have joined the Sealed Knot eight or nine years ago, never mind dummy5

the Double R lot."

Frances shrugged. "So he was busy being a flea in the establishment's ear."

"Telling soldiers in Ulster how to desert, and all that jazz?"

Mitchell echoed her scornfully. "You think so?"

The drummers sounding the changing of the guard on the ridge and at the bridge had long finished, and for a moment only silence came in through the window. So obviously Mitchell didn't know absolutely everything about everybody, thought Audley; he certainly didn't know the circumstances of Frances Fitzgibbon's widowhood and recruitment.

"And all that jazz, yes," said Frances evenly.

"But it was a little lie, Frances dear. And it was a little unnecessary lie on the face of it. Because I've been talking to some people who know him—the last two-three years he's been working on a post-graduate thesis on the Paris troubles of '68—and the thing that comes over is that he never talked about the Civil War until about a year ago. Or about his family either, come to that. He was plain Charlie Ratcliffe until then, but then he started to let slip his real name was Steyning-Ratcliffe—and that's also when he joined the Double R Society."

"All right." Frances spread her hands. "So that's when he was bitten by the Civil War bug."

"Then why didn't he admit it? I mean, he should have said

'Until a year ago I'd forgotten all about the family treasure dummy5

legend and I didn't know Cromwell from a hole in the road'.

But instead he said 'I've been studying the period for many years, I've always been fascinated with its political parallels with our own revolutionary struggles'. And that just wasn't true."

"And what was true?" said Audley.

Mitchell looked at him triumphantly. "What was true was that about eighteen months ago he ran out of bread—he's on an LEA research grant, which doesn't go very far these days.

So when he dropped out of circulation for a time no one thought twice about it. In any case, he's always going over to Paris to do research and gab with his revolutionary friends there. But my little BBC girl just happened to find out what he was really doing. Quite by chance, actually, because one of her unemployed graduate friends was in on the same job ...

which was sorting the archives of the Earl of Dawlish and packing 'em up ready for the Historical Manuscripts Commission to catalogue and calendar."

"The Earl of where?" Frances sounded disbelieving.

"Dawlish. It's down the south coast somewhere, near Torquay."

Frances shook her head. "I've never heard of the Earl of Dawlish."

"You wouldn't have done, because the title's been extinct since 1944. The archives have been given to the HMC by the Honourable Mrs. Somebody Someone, the last earl's niece."

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"So what do they reveal?" asked Audley. "Get to the point, man."

"Yes . . . well, the point is that the Earldom of Dawlish was created in 1690 by William III for services rendered by a certain George Dangerfield, who'd helped to raise the West Country against James II in 1688—"

Frances took a deep breath. "But—"

"Who in turn happened to be the grandson of a certain John Dangerfield— wait for it, Frances—who was the boon companion and crony of Captain Sir Edward Parrott, our Nathaniel's piratical father. How's that for size, then?"

Mitchell smiled at them both. "And what is even more to the point is that John Dangerfield corresponded regularly with John Pym in Westminster. There are copies of letters he wrote to Pym in 1642 and 1643 in the archives, which means that he had a courier of some kind who was prepared to run the gauntlet through Royalist country."

For a moment no one spoke, then Frances said: "But he didn't write about the gold."

Mitchell's face creased with sudden irritation. "Aw—come on, Frances! What d'you want, a miracle? Look at the way it fits in—" he raised a hand with the little finger extended "— one—

Charlie Ratcliffe, who isn't interested in Civil Wars or family history, gets a job sorting seventeenth-century documents; two—" a second finger came up "—the documents he sorts belong to a neighbour of his gold-robbing ancestors, the Parrotts; three—Charlie is suddenly in love with history and dummy5

ancestor worship; four—Cousin James dies; five— Charlie starts looking for gold, and finds it; six—" the second thumb came up "—Charlie quietly suppresses all reference to one."

He seized his little finger again. "Which means if there was evidence of the gold's existence, then Charlie's got it."

Audley rubbed his chin. "It would only be just that—evidence of its existence."

"Oh, sure. Nathaniel couldn't have known he'd have to hide it en route. But you wanted to know why Charlie was so sure there was gold to be found, and I reckon I've given you a pretty damn convincing sequence of possibilities. Everybody who ever looked for that gold could only hope that it wasn't a legend. But Charlie—he knew it was there somewhere. And I'd guess that Nayler knew it too."

Audley looked quickly at Mitchell. Not only a warm young man, but a hot one was Paul Mitchell. Because that was probably the key to Charlie Ratcliffe's achievement: the faith which moved this mountain was no relative of pious conviction, it was a positive certainty based on inside information. And that, at the moment, was also what made Paul Mitchell formidable too: he still believed with that same positive certainty that he had the inside information about himself.

And doubly hot, because the final conclusion of that sequence of possibilities of his—the seventh finger conclusion

— had to be the correct one. Indeed, it was the logical extension of that midnight brainwave which had disturbed dummy5

Faith: only something of quite extraordinary importance could have caused the Royalist and Roundhead generals to detach men from their field armies at the start of a desperate campaign, the campaign which had ended with the relief of Gloucester and the battle of Newbury, to intervene in an unimportant castle siege which was little better than a private feud.

It was just possible, in fairness, that the Royalists were reacting to a Roundhead intrusion into their territory: a quick cavalry dash was the sort of risk Prince Rupert would have relished. But the solid Parliamentary commanders of 1643 would never have countenanced such a move for precisely that reason. For them there had to be a certainty, and for certainty there had to be—again—inside information.

Which meant that there must have been communication between Colonel Nathaniel Parrott in North Devon and John Pym in Westminster. And what better for that than John Dangerfield's own private courier?

"David—" Frances interrupted his train of thought.

And the irony was that almost all the details of this tapestry of events had been known long before Charlie Ratcliffe had chanced on the proof of it. It had all been there fossilised in history, like the bones of the dinosaurs, waiting for somebody to treat it not as a curious and amusing footnote, but as a rock-hard fact.

"There's someone outside, David," said Frances.

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Audley's train of thought halted abruptly. He had half-noticed a mouse-like scuffling on the landing, but had dismissed it as the ordinary sound of the house; now, as he roused himself, the scuffling nerved itself into a sharp little knuckle-tap on the door.

"Come in," said Audley.

The door-knob shivered, then turned slowly. Mitchell came up out of his chair with uncharacteristic clumsiness, catching Champion's galloping leg on his sleeve and setting the horse rearing and plunging wildly on his stand. As the door began to open—and to open with the same terrifying slowness with which the doorknob had turned—he reached across for the hilt of his sword, for all the world like the young D'Artagnan surprised by the Cardinal's guard with the Queen's emeralds in his pocket. Incredibly, he even started to draw the blade; Audley's hold on reality went spinning as his attention was held by the mad grin of the rocking-horse and the madder sight of cold steel.

Then the sword-hand froze—and relaxed.

In the open doorway were two exquisite children, the seventeenth-century owners of the playroom, the boy an exact miniature of Paul in red taffeta and the girl a tiny blonde mite enveloped in apple-green watered silk.

The sword rasped back into its scabbard. It was an insane world, thought Audley—an insane, wicked, self-destructive world. And he had just witnessed (and, from the pounding of his heart, taken part in) one of its more horror-comic dummy5

moments.

"Ahah!" The forced jollity of Mitchell's voice betrayed the same insanity. "Mistress Henrietta Rushworth and Master Nigel Rushworth—well met, once again."

The little boy's eyes shifted from Mitchell to Audley, and Audley's own eyes dropped to the plain buff-coloured envelope the child held to his chest.

"Mistress Henrietta and Master Nigel are going to watch the battle this afternoon," explained Mitchell. "Isn't that right?"

"Everyone's dressed up," said Mistress Henrietta breathlessly. "Even Grandpa's going to dress up."

"Is that so?" said Audley. "Do you like dressing up?"

Mistress Henrietta nodded solemnly. "Why aren't you dressed up?"

"I didn't have time—and I haven't a costume." But I am dressed up really. It's the four of you who are in your real clothes. "I shall dress up next time."

"Next time." Mistress Henrietta gave him a comforting nod.

"Next time." Audley nodded back.

"Nigel's got something for you," said Henrietta, reaching out for the envelope as she spoke. "The man gave it to Grandpa."

Nigel quickly lifted the envelope above her reach, though without attempting to offer it to Audley.

"What man?"

"The man with red hair and a red face," said Mistress dummy5

Henrietta graphically. "He's waiting for you downstairs—

Nigel!"

Nigel solved his problem by taking a step forward and handing over the envelope.

"Thank you, Nigel. Will you tell the man I shall be down in a moment?"

Nigel nodded, took a step back and dug Mistress Henrietta in the ribs with his elbow.

"Lay off!" said Mistress Henrietta angrily.

Blushing to the roots of his hair, Master Nigel bent over and whispered in her ear urgently.

"Oh!" Mistress Henrietta's gaze shifted from Audley to Mitchell. Then, as her brother straightened up, she searched in the leather bag which hung from her wrist and triumphantly produced a handful of rather crushed parsley.

"For you," she said, holding it out to Mitchell.

Mitchell accepted the gift with one hand, and then swept off his plumed hat in the elaborate figure-of-eight bow with the other. "My lady . . . and you, sir—" he looked down at Master Nigel "—remember what I told you—

God for King Charles! To Pym and such carles The devil that prompts 'em their treasons parles!

—don't forget. And if they want to know where your father is, dummy5

tell them he's riding with Prince Rupert, like every other true-hearted English gentleman."

Audley slid the photographs out of the envelope.

Robert Davenport—a lean, nondescript face sandwiched between the tall black hat and the plain white collar of the Puritan divine.

David Bishop—button nose and chubby cheeks, a baby-face made more for laughter than for the steel helmet perched incongruously above it.

Philip Gates—another ordinary Anglo-Saxon face, fair hair falling across eyes which stared in surprise directly into the camera.

John Lumley—those at least were memorable features, the arched nose and jutting chin framed by the black cavalier wig and beard: it had to be a disguise because that sort of expression went with short hair in the twentieth century, no matter what the fashions of the seventeenth might have decreed.

He watched as Frances and Mitchell swopped the prints between them, noting Mitchell's cheek muscles tighten with irritation as he came to Lumley's.

"Philip Oates knew he was being photographed," said Frances, holding up the snap.

"I hope they all knew they were being photographed," said dummy5

Audley. "These are four people we're leaning on—I told you.

Plus Charlie Ratcliffe himself. All five of them, they're going to hear their phones go 'click' when they lift the receiver.

They're going to notice cars parked across the street from where they live—the same cars that were parked across the road from where they work. Their friends are going to tell them that people have been asking questions about them.

And the people they see aren't going to be the people who are doing the real watching, either. They're each getting the VIP

treatment."

Frances frowned. "You mean . . . Fail-Safe Surveillance?"

"For a week, yes."

"Even for a week, that's pretty expensive stuff." Frances's brow furrowed with the effort of the mental arithmetic she was doing. "I didn't know your budget stretched to that sort of thing just now."

Mitchell laughed suddenly. "Maybe we're expecting a profit for once. A ton of gold would pay a fairish dividend on the deal."

"Don't be silly, Paul."

"I'm not being silly, honeybunch. If David does pull this rabbit out of the hat not even the Tribune Group will be able to complain about the high cost of security —we could probably put in for a Queen's Award for Industry, I shouldn't wonder."

"But there's something not right about this." Frances dummy5

shrugged him off simply by staring at Audley. "There are too many people getting involved, David. First there were just the three of us—or four, with that policeman of yours. But now there are five surveillance teams . . . and they can't possibly operate at fail-safe level without four to a team. Plus a field controller and a technical services adviser for the electronics." She shook her head. "That's an awful lot of people, David."

"Plus the red-haired, red-faced gentleman," murmured Mitchell. "But of course we do have 'friends' helping us this time, according to David."

"Special Branch," said Frances, still watching Audley.

"Special Branch doing the harassment bit—which they hate doing. And we hate making them do it... So you can talk about us leaning on Charlie Ratcliffe, but it feels more like someone's leaning on us."

Another bright one, thought Audley. But then Mitchell, the trained military historian, had enjoyed his part of the assignment, which was little more than doing what came naturally to him. Whereas Frances, who had cut her teeth on very different problems, would have little sympathy for her task, and none at all for dressing up like this. And that had spurred her on to question its nature.

But with such a bright one, doubt was a corrosive which had to be treated seriously. "There's a political angle to this, Frances," he said gently. "Sometimes the politicians require us to pick their chestnuts out of the fire, and we have to do it.

dummy5

"Of course there's a political angle,” said Mitchell dismissively. "Charlie Ratcliffe is a political animal. And the lunatic left is a political force—a disproportionate force too, even without a war-chest full of gold. We've got to take his goodies away from him, Frances. It's as simple as that."

"It isn't simple at all," snapped Frances.

"No, it isn't simple." Audley recognised the source of her doubt: it was the knowledge that there on the left, but for the grace of God, went Frances herself, in the ranks of Charlie Ratcliffe's regiment. "But it isn't improper either. If Ratcliffe had played straight to get his gold, we wouldn't touch him.

But he didn't play straight, he played dirty. He had another human being killed—" he had to hold her here "—like a rabbit."

Kill it, Audley—go on, man—kill it!

"Yes—" Mitchell started to speak, but caught Audley's eye just in time. As though to stop up his mouth he started to munch the parsley which Mistress Henrietta had given him.

"Like a rabbit, Frances," Audley repeated. "And he didn't even have the guts to do his own killing. He hired someone."

He could feel her doubt weakening. In the end it was always a matter of trust and now she wanted to trust him, not knowing that he had won her by summoning up that old, dark memory of the harvest field.

She stared at him. "You're sure?"

No.

dummy5

But that trust was a two-way thing, like the feudal bond he had almost accepted in the Minister's car.

"Yes."

No more doubt: it was gone like a shadow in the sunlight.

Frances would serve now, consenting to whatever had to be done.

"So what next?" asked Mitchell through the parsley. "You really want me to lean on John Lumley?"

"I don't want you to do anything, either of you. Keep an eye open for them, but don't do anything. Just fight your battle today the way it's scripted. You're my Tenth Legion."

"More like Fifth Column. So what are we being reserved for, my lord?"

"The storming of Standingham Castle next Saturday."

Mitchell's eyes lit up. "Of course! Forgive me for being so dim, David—I'd got my parts mixed up."

"Your what?"

Mitchell laughed. "I was still doing my Henry V bit—your favourite play, as we all know, David—

To horse, you gallant princes! Straight to horse!"

"Don't be a pain, Paul," said Frances.

"You can't talk, Frances dear. You've been doing it far worse dummy5

than me—

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make ..."

What a young snake the boy was, thought Audley ruefully.

"But now you know our cause is just, our quarrel honourable, you can safely shift from Agincourt to Elsinore, my lady."

Mitchell was enjoying himself. "Because we're going to be Hamlet's Players in The Murder of Gonzago—

the play's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

"Bravo and good on you, David. We'll pronounce our lines trippingly, I promise you. Is there anything else you want?"

Yes, just one thing so far as Mitchell was concerned, thought Audley fervently. But he would have to settle for something less drastic.

"Yes, there is one thing," he said heavily.

"Be my guest."

"I'd like to know why the hell you're eating parsley."

But that only stopped Mitchell for a fraction of a second.

"Mistress Henrietta's gift? But of course—I asked her for it."

dummy5

Mitchell pointed to the corner of the playroom, to a small table laden with Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth's forgotten sandwiches and beer bottles. "The Royalist cavalry aren't allowed to drink today—a shocking anachronism, because they were pie-eyed back in '44. But I've had a beer and I can't afford to be dismissed the service until after I've stormed Standingham next week. Didn't your father ever tell you that parsley takes away the smell of booze, David?"

9

COLONEL BUTLER was standing in a great bow window staring down at the bridge. In his hand he had a large cut-glass tumbler of heavily-watered whisky; Audley knew it was whisky, because Butler hated sherry and avoided beer, which put too much of a strain on his bladder; and he knew it was heavily watered, because Butler was on duty, and if there was a god to whom Butler knelt (other than the one who protected his three small daughters) it would be Mithras, the soldier's god of Duty.

The same sun which had bathed Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon with seventeenth-century magic, the high midday sun, turned Butler's fiery red hair to a rich gold, but even in the sunlight Audley could see that there was grey in it now.

Colonel Butler had started to grow grey in his country's service, which would probably have pleased Butler if anyone had dared say as much.

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"Hullo, Jack," said Audley. "Good to see you."

"David." The effort of saying "David" taxed Butler sorely. It had taken Jack Butler five years to make the great leap from

"Audley" to "David", which he would have managed for his youngest and greenest subaltern in a few hours if he had remained with his Lancashire Riflemen. And by now he would have been commanding that regiment for sure; in fact, with Ulster the way it was he would have been commanding a good deal more than that, certainly more than five surveillance teams and a few Special Branch men. But Duty had got in the way of predictable promotion, and Jack Butler would never wear red tabs on his lapels now, he would live and die a colonel on the general list, seconded to special duty with an obscure department of the Ministry of Defence. And live and die quite happily, by Mithras!

But that didn't mean that he had to like calling David Audley

"David" when he didn't even approve of David Audley.

It had been his god-daughter Catherine Audley who had finally led him to that, and even she hadn't been enough to make Butler glad to see her father.

"Politics, Jack."

"Politics. Aye, politics." Butler looked at his watch. "We haven't much time."

"No. Thanks for the photographs. I liked your messengers."

Audley smiled. "The boy didn't say a word, the girl did all the talking."

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"That would be her." Butler didn't smile back, but his face softened for half a second. "I'm not supposed to communicate with your inside people, that's why— not even supposed to know who they are. But I've seen the young woman Fitzgibbon on the ridge."

Audley nodded. "Looks the part, doesn't she?"

"It suits her, I'll say that. And I wouldn't have thought so."

"You wouldn't?" But he couldn't have Frances sold short.

"More fool you, then. She's a damn good one."

That seemed to please Butler. "If you say so."

Which side would Butler have been on in 1643? thought Audley suddenly. That would be a pretty question to settle, with loyalty and duty and honour split right down the middle by common sense and those intellectual qualities which were hidden behind the archetypal red face.

But that wasn't today's problem, thank God!

"The other one's Paul Mitchell."

"Hah!" That was as close as Butler ever got to laughing.

"You think that amusing?"

Butler's face shut like a portcullis. "I think you've got two good ones then, that's what I think."

Audley was irritated at the anger he felt. "But you also think it's funny. Why?"

Butler looked at his watch again.

"Why?" Audley persisted.

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Butler shrugged. "I think it's . . . interesting that you don't like him."

"What d'you mean by that?"

This time Butler sighed, looking at Audley for a moment with his head on one side. "Let's say ... I think you ought to look in the mirror sometime, and then look at Mitchell. But I'd prefer to bring you up to date, if you don't mind."

Audley swallowed. "Very well."

"The London end is going satisfactorily. There's a rumour a foot thick in the City that Ratcliffe's credit isn't so good any more. We haven't attempted to define it, but the way it's come back to us is that there's been a break in the murder investigation which implicates him and that there's a technicality in the treasure trove law which no one has thought of before."

"But we didn't start those rumours?"

Butler shook his head. "No. We just put you in at the top, that's all. They've done the rest themselves . . . with a little help from your friend Fattorini. He's been a tower of weakness in the market."

Audley smiled to himself at the thought of Matthew happily serving God and Mammon at the same time.

"And our five subjects?"

Butler took a sip of whisky. "Ratcliffe is a bit rattled. He was close to clinching a deal on a nice little second-hand offset press—the printer's about to go bust—and this has nearly dummy5

scuppered it. We've helped someone else put in a cash bid for the same press backed with a government printing contract, too ... he doesn't know about the contract, but he does know about the bid. And his old printer is baying for the money he owes."

"I'd heard about that."

Butler's lip drooped. "There's a nasty solicitor's letter in the post. He should have got it by now."

"So he should be running scared?"

"Not scared. I don't think this lad will scare easily. But angry

—yes, I think he may well be angry. Because he's not stupid and he can put two and two together."

"But he can't prove anything?"

"Not a thing. And that's really what's making him angry: he isn't used to the other side playing dirty. But beyond that, he must assume that we're working on something real, and he can't possibly have any idea what it is."

That was true, certainly. Charlie Ratcliffe had too much at stake to assume they were bluffing, and with luck also too much to tempt him to play it cool in the hope of calling their bluff. If he wasn't off balance yet he was no longer quite steady.

"Good. And the other four?"

Butler drew a deep breath. "It's really too early to say. If there's a guilty one then he's got the most reason to play innocent, and the innocent ones haven't had enough dummy5

prodding to wonder what the devil's happening. Also, if the innocent ones are guilty of something we're not interested in

—that can be a problem."

"But you've done some checking on them?"

"Oh yes, we've checked them. But first time round there's nothing anyone could put a finger on."

"There wouldn't be. And Mitchell swears Lumley is clean, for one."

Butler nodded, lips tightly compressed. "Yes, he would. He knows Lumley from the time before he was with us, when he was a research fellow at the Institute for Military Studies.

And I'd be inclined to go along with him there, too. Lumley has the wrong profile for Ratcliffe's purposes. And also he's the one of the four that Ratcliffe has never met, so far as we can establish."

"But he has met the others?"

"Oh yes. That's about all he has done with Oates and Bishop—

met them. They're not in his regiment, and they don't have his extreme brand of politics, but they're both postgraduate students at Wessex University, which is roughly what he is."

"Sociology?"

"No. They're both geographers, actually. One's doing a thesis on geology now, and the other's writing a book on meteorology. Ology is about the only thing they have in common that we can find, but it's early days yet."

Early days. But there were only seven days to the storming of dummy5

Standingham Castle, and after that all days might be too late.

"And that leaves Robert Davenport."

"Ye-ess. ..." Butler spread the word reflectively. "That does leave Robert Davenport."

'' 'Preacher' Davenport.''

"He certainly does his share of preaching—for a foreigner in a strange land."

"You sound as though you've doubts about Davenport, Jack."

"Not doubts—reservations." Butler shook his head.

"Davenport is the obvious one, that's all ... and I don't like obvious ones, they worry me. He fits too well."

"How does he fit?"

"Right politics, for a start—or right left politics," Butler growled disapprovingly. "Left of left, never heard anything like it in my life. Nor has anyone else, I should think."

Audley smiled, thinking of poor Gerard Winstanley and his ragged band of Diggers, who had once tried to cultivate a tiny corner of common land in Christian brotherhood and humility. That had been much too strong for Oliver Cromwell's stomach too. "I don't know about that."

"You haven't heard him talk."

"Did he talk like that in the States?"

"We're working on that." Butler bridled at the question somewhat, and Audley knew exactly why: it would ordinarily have been the easiest thing in the world to ask the CIA about dummy5

Davenport, but in this case that might amount to washing their own dirty political linen in an inquisitive neighbour's machine. And with Davenport's radical politics there was the added complication that American intelligence might already be well-established in his home territory, wherever it was, so that any British agent moving into it would have to act with the greatest caution. But caution made for slowness.

"He's a New Englander, from his voice. And he's well-educated—he knows his history," said Audley.

"We know that. What we don't know is what he's been doing since he left his state university nine years ago."

"What's he doing over here—we have to know that, for heaven's sake."

"Officially, just travelling for pleasure. He's supposed to have had a legacy, or an inheritance of some sort, and decided to do Europe on it. He hasn't got past England yet." Butler paused. "Been here eight months now, and clean as a whistle.

But he's still the obvious one—and we're working on him."

The years had mellowed Butler, thought Audley.

"But . . . I'll tell you one thing . . ." Butler spoke slowly, as though he wanted the words to sink in deeply "... we're not really working on Ratcliffe himself. We're pushing him, but we're not investigating him. That's specifically outside the brief."

"Uh-huh?" And saying as much was also outside the brief, at a guess, thought Audley. It was a glorious defect of Butler's dummy5

that his loyalties, even his overriding loyalty to Queen and Country, were still limited by his ideas of fair play.

"You know, eh?" Butler spelt out his warning with a shrug.

"I've been fairly explicitly warned off," Audley nodded. "And the file on Ratcliffe is an edited one, too—which means that they already have a shrewd idea what Charlie intends to do when he's able to do it. So this is in the nature of a spoiling operation." He smiled at Butler in sudden gratitude; fair play wasn't friendship, but among equals it was the next best thing, and possibly a better thing at that. "But thanks, Jack."

Butler shied away from the smile as though it were a snake in his path, half turning towards the window and putting his nose back into the tumbler. As he did so there came a shout of command from outside and the same brittle drumming which had marked the change of the guard on the bridge fifteen minutes earlier.

"Well, if you want anything else from me you'd better make it quick," said Butler. "Your man's arrived."

Audley peered over his shoulder down at the bridge. The Royalist musketeers had formed up in a line alongside one parapet, complete with drummer and standard bearer, all standing rigidly to attention. From the other side of the bridge a trumpet pealed out and a Roundhead trooper rode into view, less gorgeous than the knot of cavalier officers who had gathered at the Royalist end, but much more warlike in his lobster-tailed steel helmet, polished breast-plate and leather buff-coat. For a moment or two he fought with his dummy5

horse, which clearly disapproved of the trumpet call, but having mastered it rose in his stirrups and lifted a white flag of truce high above his head.

"You're getting the full treatment," observed Butler.

One of the cavalier officers advanced a few steps and doffed his plumed hat, holding it across his chest. The Roundhead dismounted and advanced on foot across the bridge to meet him. The cavalier, still bareheaded, gave a small bow and the Roundhead lifted his gloved hand in salute—presumably his helmet was rather more difficult to remove. Then, after a few minutes of conversation, each returned to his own side.

"Just like a film," said Audley.

"Aye. And us in the one-and-nine-pennies," said Butler.

"That dates you, Jack—the one-and-nine-pennies."

The trumpet pealed again and a new figure appeared from the Roundhead side; like the troopers, he wore a steel breastplate and a buff-coat, but these were topped by a wide lace collar and a large, stiff-brimmed black hat.

"Except I was always in the one-and-threepences,"

murmured Butler. "But there he is, anyway: the Parliamentary Labour candidate for Mid-Wessex . . . alias Oliver Cromwell for today. Which isn't altogether inappropriate, I suppose."

The black-hatted Roundhead paused for a second in the centre of the bridge. The Royalist drummer beat a fierce little ruffle and the King's flag came down in salute. Once more the dummy5

cavalier officer advanced to meet his enemies, but this time he wore his hat—and this time when he swept it off he bowed much lower.

"What's he like?" asked Audley.

"William Strode?" Butler sniffed. "He'll never sit for this seat, I tell you. It's rock-solid Conservative, no matter how moderate he tries to be, they'll never elect him here."

"But he will sit for somewhere, sometime?"

"Oh aye. When he's done his time losing they'll give him a winner. If your Minister stays in power, that is."

Audley ignored the jibe; Butler's contempt for politics, left, right or centre, was always apt to make him irascible. "He's a genuine moderate, then?"

Butler sniffed again. "Aye."

"Security rating?"

"Clean as a whistle. He'll not be one of Charlie Ratcliffe's friends, that you can rely on."

That was altogether very convenient, thought Audley. The way the moderate left viewed the far left was like the old orthodox Christians had felt about heretics: whereas pagans just didn't know any better, not having had the True Faith revealed to them, heretics were the devil's Fifth Column in their own ranks. . . .

Which hatred the heretics returned with compound interest, because they also knew that the only historical difference between orthodoxy and heresy was the final winning or dummy5

losing.

He nodded at Butler. "So maybe we can do business with him."

"Not we—you. I'm damned if I'm going to horse-trade with politicians when I'm not even sure of the business I'm in. I'll do the donkey-work for you, but this time you do your own dirty work, David."

"Suit yourself, Jack." Audley smiled at Butler. The Colonel's political hangup went much deeper than his military instincts, he reminded himself; in fact, despite all appearances, he had risen from the ranks and a cloth-cap background in which his subsequent career was regarded as an act of defiance, if not actual treason.

In close-up the Double R Society's version-for-the-day of the Grand Plotter and Contriver of all Mischiefs in England was something less impressive than the original, at least in appearance; even in his Roundhead General Staff uniform he was still a ratty little man, sharp-featured and bright-eyed.

The eyes fastened instantly on Audley, snapping him for future reference. So it wasn't going to be so easy after all: the prospective Labour candidate for Mid-Wessex was no fool and no beginner, those eyes indicated. The natural selection of political jungle warfare, which forced men like this one to watch their backs as well as their fronts, had made William Strode very wary.

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"Mr—?" Strode didn't wait to be introduced.

"Audley."

"Mr. Audley . . . Colonel Butler asked me this morning if I could come to see you now—here." The eyes flicked briefly towards Butler. "You both represent a branch of the security services?"

"That's correct."

"I can give you five minutes. In ten minutes' time I'm seeing the Royalist commander. You can have half that time, no more."

"I might want more than that, Mr. Strode."

"It's all you can have."

Audley smiled his most unfriendly smile. "Then I shall have to be brief, won't I? Mr. Strode, I want your help."

Strode said nothing for a few seconds, as though an appeal for aid hadn't been what he was expecting.

"Indeed?" he said finally. "Or?"

"Or—what?"

"Or what will you do if I don't choose to help you?" The gleam in Strode's eye was obstinate now. "After all, helping the internal security service isn't going to make me popular in my own party. If I help you I take a risk. It doesn't happen to be a risk I want to take."

"But I haven't told you what sort of help I want."

"You don't need to. I know the Roundhead Wing has some dummy5

pretty far-out types in it—political extremists you people are bound to be interested in. But I intend to beat them my way without your help, Mr. Audley. By the rule book and the ballot box, I shall beat them."

"Not Charlie Ratcliffe, you won't beat him that way." Audley shook his head.

"Charlie—?"

"That's right. Because Charlie isn't going to use the rule book and the ballot box. He's going to use the printing press. And he's going to do to you, Mr. Strode —and people like you—

what the South Africans are alleged to have done to the Liberal Party. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about him, Mr. Strode. But there just may be something I can do—with your co-operation."

Strode stared at him. "You mean . . . you're just after Ratcliffe, no one else?"

"Ratcliffe—and whoever helped him murder James Ratcliffe."

Strode frowned. "You're re-opening the murder case?"

"It was never closed. Though, to be frank, I don't give a stuff who killed who—I already know that. But I want Ratcliffe to start worrying about it, so I want the word out that the police are pursuing a promising new line of inquiry. And I want that rumour to start at the very top—from you."

The cast of calculation was in Strode's eye now. "That's no problem. That's pure law-and-order."

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"The next thing's no more difficult. . . . Will you be at Standingham next weekend?"

"Of course. I'm playing the part of Sir Edmund Steyning."

"With Charlie as Nathaniel Parrott?" Audley smiled. "It's all planned, is it?"

"It's the biggest show we've ever put on." Strode nodded, more cautiously this time. "The BBC is filming it for television, so we're aiming at a maximum muster."

"And it's all planned?"

Strode nodded again. "The advance party will be going down on Thursday to set the scene. Then there's a full-dress rehearsal on the Friday evening, and we'll stage the storming for the public on the Saturday and the Sunday. With any luck we'll have a turn out of at least eight hundred."

"Eight hundred and one now. I shall be attaching myself to your staff, Sir Edmund."

Strode frowned. "You can't fight if you aren't a member. I can't break our own rules."

"I don't want to fight. I want to be free to 'come and go and look and know'—put me down as a friend of yours, or a foreign observer, or whatever you like. But one way or another, Mr. Strode, I want to be there to breathe down Charlie Ratcliffe's neck. I'm going to run him to hounds, and run him to ground—and then I'm going to dig him out and let him go again, and hunt him again—until he doesn't know whether it's April 1st or Christmas Day. And you're going to dummy5

let me do it, with no questions asked and no answers given . . . which you'll do for the same reason that Oliver Cromwell came down on the Levellers: either we break them or they break us."

They stared at each other. The five minutes was long passed, thought Audley, but for this cause a Royalist general ought to be indulgent.

Strode blinked at last. "All right, Audley. . . . But not for that reason."

Audley shrugged. "Then whatever reason you like."

"I don't like—and neither should you." Strode shook his head. "It's because there'll always be someone like you, whoever wins. But if Charlie Ratcliffe has his way you won't have to ask me to help you—you'll be giving the orders. And I wouldn't like that."

Butler lingered at the door, one eye on the hall until Strode had gone.

"And now?" he said.

"And now—if they start cracking anywhere, Jack—then we're in with a chance."

"Aye. And if they don't?"

"Then we fail." Audley met the odds blandly. "This is bloody politics, man. We do our best, but we go by the rule book, like Mr. Moderate William Strode. So at least we don't get our fingers burnt picking up someone else's chestnuts."

Butler grimaced at him. "You don't think we've got a hope, do dummy5

you? You're just causing mischief, that's all."

Audley shrugged. "All right, then. Let's say: 'Mischief, do thy work', Jack. Maybe it will, at that."

"Aye." Butler looked out of the window, towards the cavaliers guarding the bridge. "But whose work will it do, I wonder?"

Part Two:

How to be a bad winner

1

15. Royalist Army regroups. Final exhortation by Lord Monson (to be relayed by loudspeaker to crowd). Pioneers will obtain fresh fascines.

16. Roundhead Army regroups. Regimental commanders to ensure that no personnel are within fifty (50) yards of glacis below Great Bastion (red flag markers).

17. 4.40: Special Effects Section will fire simulated magazine explosion.

18. 4.41: The Great Assault. Pioneers will . . .

It had taken Audley four days to complete his report on the current state of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was dummy5

three days less than he had allowed himself originally; and which, he reminded himself irritably, would have left him ten days buckshee holiday with Faith and Cathy if he hadn't been conned, bullied and dragooned into messing around with politicians' chestnuts to absolutely no effect.

He looked up from the Double R Society's scenario for the storming of Standingham Castle to check the time by the grandfather clock beside his study door.

Absolutely no effect as of 10.15 a.m., Thursday August 28.

Nobody had panicked, nobody had misbehaved, nobody had done anything that he ought not to have done. Nobody had done anything.

In a minute or two Faith would bring him a cup of coffee, and with luck she would kiss him, and since the heat of the day was yet to come he would kiss her back; and at 10.30 he would phone Jack Butler, and Jack would report that nothing had happened since 6 p.m. the previous evening, at considerable cost to the taxpayer.

He reached across his desk to check his assignment diary.

(Afterwards, when he looked at the diary, before he dropped it in his waste-paper basket, he would recall 10.15 a.m., Thursday, August 28, with what he assumed must be the same bitterness as that with which some US Navy veterans must remember the last few minutes before 7.55 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. By that time there was nothing they could do to stop the Japanese bombs and torpedoes, just as by that time there was nothing he could have done to dummy5

stop Sergeant Henry Digby going down to the Ferryhill Industrial Estate in answer to a phone call the nature of which he never was able to establish. But those last minutes of peace of mind, before everything changed, were still the moments to regret.)

Faith came in with the coffee, still wearing her serene morning-after-last-night face, when everything had gone the way it ought to go, if not somewhat better.

(10.16 a.m. now: Sergeant Digby was turning into the Ferryhill estate, looking for the Wessex Electronics building.

"I'm just going down to Ferryhill," he had told his mother,

"to meet someone." He had seven minutes of life ahead of him then.)

But Faith didn't stay—

"Darling, I've got to fly—got to take Cathy down to the village to play with—"

No matter. Audley bent his head over the scenario.

Tomorrow he would go down to Winchester, where Paul Mitchell would give him his costume for the afternoon, and report that nothing of interest had happened, and that the Tenth Legion was getting bored with inactivity.

He read the scenario again, and began to drowse over it, staring out at the dying elms beyond the lawn. He would have to hire someone to cut them down—they were too big for him—and then the bark, where the infection lay, would have to be stripped off. And that would be damned dummy5

expensive, but he couldn't burn them where they fell; that would be wasteful as well as difficult. . . .

(It didn't matter now. The battleships were sinking and burning now, and the admiral had torn his epaulettes from his shoulders. Henry Digby was dead now.) He started to think of the CIA. In a way, by carefully failing now, he was protecting the Department from that fate. If he'd really tried to screw Charlie Ratcliffe he would probably have ended up by causing a big scandal, which wouldn't have done Counter-intelligence any good at all—with all those far-left-wing MP's asking awkward questions in the House of Commons about the infringement of personal liberties. Even William Strode had suspected that he was a fascist beast in disguise.

He forgot all about phoning Jack Butler. It was no longer of any importance.

Just after the grandfather clock struck eleven Faith returned, bearing cakes which old Mrs. Clark had baked for them, some of which she would pack up for the weekend expedition into seventeenth-century England.

It occurred to him that the best thing he could do would be to arrange for Charlie Ratcliffe to be part of the Special Effects Section's simulated magazine explosion, thus solving all problems. Which happy thought encouraged him to kiss her, which she mistook as an advanced farewell on account of his imminent departure for manoeuvres at Standingham Castle, and returned the hug with interest. And the late August sun dummy5

shone on them both.

Then the phone rang.

Audley removed one hand from his wife and reached back across his desk for the receiver.

"Stop it, love—if you whisper into one ear I'll never hear anything in the other. . . . Hullo. Audley speaking."

For no particular reason he stared at the grandfather. The hands were on five past eleven.

Dr. Audley, this is—

Superintendent Weston has asked me to—

I'm afraid I have to tell you that—

He was still staring at the clock. The minute hand always jerked forward so strongly that it marked each advance with a shiver.

"Are you there, sir?"

"Yes. When did this happen?"

10.23. Henry Digby had been dead for . . . forty-three minutes now.

"Where?"

He listened.

"Where?" Time had stopped. "What was he doing there?"

Not in a position to say.

"Get me Superintendent Weston."

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Superintendent Weston was busy. Of course he was busy.

"Don't argue with me. You don't think he told you to phone me out of courtesy, do you? Get him."

Hold the line.

"What's the matter, David? What's happened?" asked Faith.

"Henry Digby's dead."

"This time next year he'll be Inspector Digby CID."

"Well, you just make sure he is, that's all."

"So you be careful of him . . . sir."

Faith was no longer touching him, she was looking at him in appalled anger. "What have you done, David?"

"I haven't done anything."

"You mean it was an accident? A road—" But she could read his face like a book. "But it wasn't an accident, was it? What have you done?"

He could only shake his head. "I don't understand. He wasn't doing anything dangerous. I deliberately didn't put him in harm's way."

"You said he'd have to take his chance."

She was remembering the same conversation now. "You said that."

"That's what I said, not what I did." But he was already dummy5

arguing with only half his mind; the other half was groping towards the immediate consequences.

"Well, you bloody well miscalculated, didn't you! Whatever you did." And already her anger was changing also, but into helplessness. "He was . . . too young."

So he was, thought Audley, remembering Digby's threadbare dressing-gown. Too young, but no younger than half the names on the old hot war casualty lists— even older than some of those. Except that they had known the reason why, and Digby—

"What happened?"

He stared at her. "What happened?" He heard himself repeat the question with a curious detachment. Repeating questions was a stupid habit which had always irritated him.

"Or shouldn't I ask?" She was not far away from sympathy now, and anger was preferable to that; sympathy only emphasised the truth of her earlier reaction.

You've bloody well miscalculated!

"He was shot. It happened somewhere on the Ferryhill Industrial Estate." He spoke harshly. "And don't ask me what he was doing there, because I haven't the faintest bloody idea."

There was a click on the phone at his ear.

"Is that you, Audley?"

"Yes." Audley steeled himself for what was to come.

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Yet nothing came: there was a vacuum between them as each waited for the other to speak. He had expected Weston to be tightly controlled in his reaction, but silence was a refinement which surprised him. It was pointless to be sorry, anyway: only Faith's question was left to him.

"What happened?"

"It was just bad luck, that's all."

"Bad luck?" The answer was even more surprising than the silence. It was the wrong answer the wrong tone of voice—

the wrong everything. "What d'you mean —bad luck?"

"His being there just then." Weston paused. "Didn't they tell you?"

Audley just managed to stop himself repeating the question.

If he did that once more it would become a habit. "No, they didn't."

He heard Weston speak to someone else —presumably the detective constable— but couldn't make out any of the words.

"I'm sorry Audley." More indistinct words. "I'm sorry—I thought you had been told, but it seems they hadn't had the confirmation here until a minute or two back. It was the IRA." Weston paused. "I take it he wasn't investigating anything which had an Irish connection—for you?"

"Of course not." Sheer incredulity roughened Audley's reply.

"I didn't think so. Then that's what it was—sheer accident.

He just happened to run into one of their bomb squads in the act of planting a bomb. He must have caught them planting dummy5

it, and he tried to tackle them. And they shot him."

Steady. "You've had confirmation of that?"

"We had a phone call at 10.25—Irish accent and codeword.

They said there was a bomb outside Wessex Electronics and we had ten minutes to clear the place."

"And there was a bomb?"

"We've just defused it—the Army has. Ten pounds of gelignite and one of those damned American detonators—the ones they lost in Vietnam—that's what they think." Another pause. "Look, Audley— as you can imagine, I'm pretty pushed now. We've got a fighting chance of picking the bastards up—this is a largely rural area, outside the estate, not like Birmingham or London. So we've got it sealed off tight now ... so I shall have to hang up on you, you understand?"

"Of course." Under the circumstances Weston had already shown remarkable courtesy in even coming to the phone.

"Thank you for sparing the time. Good-bye then, Superintendent—and good hunting."

"Don't you worry about that. We'll get them." Weston was coldly businesslike. "I'm sorry about . . . your business. But there's nothing I can do about that at the moment. Goodbye, Audley."

"It was the IRA," said Audley.

"Oh," said Faith. "Oh ... I'm sorry, David ... I mean—I'm sorry."

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She turned away.

Audley watched the door close.

Acceptance.

Just say It was the IRA and you receive acceptance. Anger and bitterness and helplessness and bafflement—and acceptance. Even from a total professional, with the evidence served up steaming on a plate, the acceptance was automatic.

Except, to be fair, Weston was still in pursuit at this moment, and the unanswered questions had to wait in such circumstances.

Like—what the hell was Henry Digby doing on the Ferryhill Industrial Estate, way off course, at ten o'clock in the morning?

Audley picked up the phone again and dialled.

"Colonel Butler? Anything doing, Jack?"

Grunt. "Pretty quiet."

"Absolutely nothing you could put your finger on?"

"No. . . . Haven't had the morning reports yet, of course."

"You sound as though you've reservations about that."

Grunt. "Nothing tangible. We've pulled off the front men now, of course—did that on Tuesday midday, as I told you yesterday."

That was routine. The obvious watchers, having established their presence, had removed themselves, leaving the dummy5

observation to more unobtrusive and sophisticated men and machines in the hope that fear or foolishness might now betray any guilty party into activity. It was a crude bit of psychology, but it was occasionally successful nevertheless.

"And?"

"Nothing. But the man Davenport worries me. He visited the American Embassy on Tuesday."

"No reason why he shouldn't. Did our inside man there know what he did there?"

"Apparently not. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if he wasn't getting ready to run for it, that's all."

"Why d'you think that?"

"Hard to say. . . . He's been buying one or two little extras, paying one or two debts. . . . And I had Maitland search his flat."

"Maitland?" Audley lined up the technical support men in his mind and picked out a freckle-faced expert with hair even more ginger than Butler's. "Yes, I know him. A good man."

"He didn't find anything. But he had the strong impression that Davenport was expecting to be searched—the way things were left. And he said he couldn't guarantee that Davenport wouldn't know his place hadn't been turned over, if that was the case, because he couldn't leave every hair in its original position."

"I understand—which would make Davenport a pro."

Maitland—of course!

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"Very well." Audley steadied his voice. Maitland had once a partner, a clever young trainee who had got himself blown up while examining a booby-trapped car. . . . "You'd better put a watch on the ports and airports, Jack. If Davenport moves—

if any of them move—pick 'em up and hold 'em."

"For what?"

"Suppression of Terrorism Act. No lawyers and no phone calls until I've seen them. And see that their bags aren't searched, too."

Jenkins, that was the boy's name. He'd been the younger brother of a friend of Hugh Roskill's. And it had been Butler himself who had brought the news of his death—to this very house, four or five years back. . . .

"And you meet me at the Steyning Arms at Standingham tonight, Jack. As arranged."

Jenkins.

The Jenkins Gambit, he had called it, because Jenkins himself had been the booby-trappers' target: the best way to kill a food taster is by poisoning his master's dish—then it looks like an occupational hazard.

And, by the same token, the best way to murder a policeman was to kill him in the execution of his duty, where sudden death was an occupational hazard which good coppers could be relied on to accept.

And Digby had been a good copper.

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Audley stared at the grandfather clock.

And now Digby was a dead copper.

The thought of Digby dead was a physical pain. He would never see Digby again. He would never introduce Frances Fitzgibbon to Digby, that little matchmaking dream of Faith's

—a crazy dream, but no bad dream—was gone like smoke on a summer's day. He had only known the boy for a few hours, and the boy had felt nothing for him but curiosity, yet the sense of loss was none the less bitter for that. It was boys—

and men—like Digby who held the sky suspended; taken for granted in life, and mourned only briefly in the headlines in death, more out of public piety than from conviction.

Henry Digby was dead, and he would rot and putrefy, and long before he was dust he would be forgotten. Even Audley himself, who might be as guilty as the killer, would soon relegate him to a dull ache of conscience, and then a mere regret, and at the last a hazy memory of one job that hadn't gone according to plan years ago.

Faith was in the doorway, beside the grandfather clock.

"It's been on the news, David—the twelve o'clock news."

He looked at her stupidly. "About Digby?"

"They didn't mention him by name. They said a policeman had been shot and killed, and that the army had defused a bomb—" She stopped.

"Yes?" He could see that there was more.

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"But there was another bomb that went off—a car bomb. Two other people have been killed."

"Yes?"

"They think they were in the car. They're not sure, but they think so. And the police think they may have been the bombers themselves."

There was a nuance of satisfaction in her voice. No one was more resolute against the death penalty than Faith, but when God Himself jogged the hand on the bomb she was as bloodthirsty as any sans-culotte in her approval of the execution.

Now only the clock was staring at him.

Thesis: it had been Watson's "pure bad luck", with Digby going down to the estate to his death for some simple innocent reason. Bad luck with an Irish accent, and an IRA codeword and an IRA bomb to prove it, begorrah.

The minute hand moved.

Antithesis: bombs and brogues proved nothing, and passwords and codewords were known; and any killer with the price of a phone call could have lured Henry Digby to meet his bullet, anywhere, any time—and who better than Charlie Ratcliffe, who had hired death once already? Charlie, whom they'd been driving towards action, driving with cold deliberation towards the belief that there was something very wrong with his beautiful golden plan.

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And now the car bomb.

Another minute.

Thesis: it had happened before and it would happen again, the bomber fragmented by his own bomb. Bombs were no respectors of persons, Weathermen, Irishmen, Palestinians, housewives on the way to the supermarket, golden lads and lasses. And, as he well knew, those American time pencils from Vietnam were notoriously unreliable.

Antithesis: killers killed to a pattern, and stripped of all their superficial differences this was Swine Brook Field all over again, by God! Because but for the accident of Digby's presence Swine Brook Field would have been a nice neat accident too. Sooner or later in the controlled violence of the Double R Society's battles someone might have caught the butt-end of a pike. And now sooner or later had caught both Sergeant Digby and his killers.

But if his thesis was right?

That was the temptation. All he had to do was to accept his own innocence, and he was in the clear. Without Digby's special knowledge he would be half-blind at Standingham this evening and tomorrow and on Saturday. He could do his best and fail, and no one would blame him very much. Some you won and some you lost, and Sir Frederick would be the first to admit that politics was the very devil.

It didn't even require any special effort. It wasn't as if Digby had been ferreting around in the area of James Ratcliffe's dummy5

murder at Swine Brook Field, and that was the only crime which Charlie Ratcliffe had committed. He'd only been filling in on the details of the gold itself, where Charlie had been on safe ground—his very own ground, where nobody could touch him.

Unless—

Audley knew that if he pursued the alternative he would have no choice in the outcome. Once he lifted the phone and called Weston again and said No. Screw bad luck. He was working for me and therefore he died for me—until you can prove otherwise then Weston would never rest until that otherwise was established. It wouldn't be a matter of guilt or blame for Weston—it would be a matter of truth, and a matter of keeping faith.

No choice, anyway. He could have no more avoided the alternative than the clock's minute hand could have avoided ticking to the next sub-division of its hour. Only when the clock stopped would the hand stop.

The phone rang in the exact instant that he reached for it, almost as though it had been waiting for him to make up his mind. Audley stared at it in a mixture of exasperation and relief. It had to be Weston, he felt that with a strange calm certainty; it had to be Weston because the moment the heat of the hunt was off Weston would find the accident of Digby's presence on the Ferryhill Industrial Estate sticking in his throat, a question much too sharp to be swallowed. And if he dummy5

had been unexpectedly quick in feeling its point it was no less true that Audley had been fatally slow in anticipating it: he could never bring himself to say "I was just going to call you"

now, even if there had been the least chance of it being believed. As it was, he had missed his chance by a matter of seconds.

But there was justice in that. The error was still his error, admitting it did not exonerate him of it. No anger or contempt of Weston's would ever hurt him as much as his own self-anger and self-contempt.

"Weston?" He was so certain that the question was unnecessary.

"What?"

Butler?

Audley blinked with surprise. But he'd only just been talking to Butler—

"Is that you, Audley?"

Butler.

"Yes. I'm sorry—I thought you were someone else." Audley realised that he had a fresh lease of life where Weston was concerned. "I'm expecting a call, Jack, so make it quick—

whatever it is."

"I will indeed," Butler snapped. "You were right."

It was a comfort to have been right about something, after having been fatally wrong once already today, thought dummy5

Audley.

"I was, was I?"

"Davenport. It came in just after you phoned."

"He's started to move?"

"He's moved. And he damn near moved too fast for us. It's a mercy we'd strengthened the surveillance on him or he might have managed it."

Audley half-smiled into the receiver at the typically Butlerian modesty. Butler had been right in his suspicions and Butler had strengthened the surveillance, but nothing would make him admit as much.

"What happened?"

"He'd established a route pattern to London over the past three days. But this morning he ditched his car in Staines and threw our tail. But our lad was smart—he switched the back-up straight to London Airport and put them on red alert there, it's only minutes from Staines, of course."

"And that paid off, I take it?"

Butler allowed himself a small grunt of satisfaction. "He had a flight bag waiting for him there, and a ticket to Holland.

And a spare passport in the name of Donaldson." Butler paused. "Which he's used half a dozen times before in the past year. One trip to Holland, five trips to Paris."

Davenport.

The conflicting implications of what Butler was saying dummy5

suddenly began to jostle Audley, elbowing each other like a crowd which had smelt smoke in the auditorium. Digby was dead and Davenport had run for cover—and that escape kit at the airport made him a pro for sure. But, more than that, if the deed and the action were connected, he ought not to be running, he ought to be playing it cool; and if they were not connected, then that shored up the good luck thesis, undermining his own conclusions about Digby's death. And yet, again, those trips to Paris ... if they were Charlie Ratcliffe-orientated—

But why should a professional run?

What did he think they could prove against him?

"What does he have to say for himself?"

"Precious little. He says his name's Donaldson, and he's an innocent American. And this isn't a police state, but he wants to phone his embassy just in case."

Well, that was playing it by the book. And for a man in Davenport/Donaldson's position that was the only way he could play it, guilty or innocent.

But for his captors the options were more varied. There was no problem in holding him; even without the passport they had the Suppression of Terrorism Act, and with the passport they could probably make a legitimate meal of him at their leisure. But leisure was something they didn't have—he knew that, and Butler knew it too. And, for a guess, Davenport/

Donaldson knew it also: if the ticket waiting for him had dummy5

been for Holland, then he would look to be met there, or at least to announce his safe arrival. So the advantage they had in having taken him on the wing was a fragile one, and every moment wasted gave the enemy time to adjust his defences.

The old clock was still ticking and Butler was waiting for him to do what he was paid for: to out-think the clock.

And he still had to phone Weston, to admit what the Superintendent would never forgive, the squandering of a useful life. That wasn't a pleasant prospect, rendered no more endurable for that it couldn't be avoided.

What can't be cured must be endured.

What must be endured must be used—

"Jack . . . listen—this is what I want you to do—"

He waited while they searched for Weston. It occurred to him that he could still be entirely wrong, and he had already made mistakes enough to make that a fair bet for any honest bookmaker. And if he was wrong he would be raising the devil for himself now.

But that too was what they paid him for, to raise the devil.

"Audley?" Weston's voice was rough with accumulated tension.

And that was also part of the payment, the excitement of backing the judgement and taking the risk. It was a very odd sort of job satisfaction.

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"I'm sorry to bother you again, Superintendent. You've got your men, then?" He paused deliberately. "But in pieces—is that right?"

"That's the way it looks." The words came with an effort.

"You're sure?"

For a moment Weston didn't answer, but when he did the roughness had been smoothed away. "No. It's too early to be sure of anything."

"But you have some evidence that the men in the car were the killers?"

"I can't say that yet, sir." The voice was hard as toughened steel now; Weston was thinking new thoughts and connecting up old facts with them. He would have thought them eventually, but this way he was being pushed towards them. "I'll let you know in due course, Dr. Audley."

"I'm afraid due course won't do, Superintendent."

"And I'm afraid it will have to do."

"No, it won't." Steel cuts oak— diamond cuts steel. "Look, Superintendent ... I can make you answer me, but it will take time and effort. I don't mind making the effort, but I can't spare the time—neither of us can spare the time. So don't let's waste it while we've still got it, eh?"

That was spelling it out both ways, confirming Weston's new suspicions about Digby's death and Audley's executive authority at the same time. Only the velvet question mark at the end had been a concession that Weston too had an dummy5

authority.

Weston drew one deep, audible breath. "Very well. It is too early to be sure— we've been at the scene of the explosion not very long and we haven't near finished there. But it looks as though they were switching vehicles, and the bomb went off as they were driving away."

"And the connection?"

"It was a small bomb. The man in the passenger's seat was actually holding it, it looks like—on his lap, probably."

Weston paused grimly. "There was a sawn-off shotgun in the back of the car."

"Yes?"

For two seconds Weston was silent.

"The man who shot Digby used a sawn-off shotgun," he said.

Audley held the receiver tightly and forced his eyes to remain open, knowing that if he closed them for even one fraction of an instant he would start seeing pictures. And this wasn't the time for pictures.

"So it's all wrapped up neatly?"

"We haven't established any identification yet."

But they would, thought Audley. They would. And a dingy room somewhere, with bomb-making materials and ammunition, and maybe an Armalite rule or two. There was always an Armalite. Perhaps there'd be a bunch of shamrocks and a couple of tickets for the Holyhead-Dun Laoghaire boat-train for good measure, too.

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"Is that what you wanted, Audley?" Weston broke the silence.

"Yes. I don't believe a word of it."

"You don't—?" The words trailed off into a growl.

"I mean—it's all true and it's all false."

Pause.

"I think you'd better explain that, Dr. Audley."

"I will. Where can I meet you?"

"I shall be here at headquarters."

"But I'm not going to meet you there. We're not playing that sort of ball game any more. This is between the two of us first."

Longer pause.

"Very well. There's a park about a mile from here—"

Audley relaxed and listened.

2

THE road through the park ran, at the point of the first rendezvous, between an avenue of horse-chestnut trees, which in season no doubt provided a supply of conkers for the patrons of the children's playground on the left, but which now shaded the spectators of the cricket match in progress on the sports ground to the right.

Audley threaded his way between the deck-chairs and picnic-spread rugs to where Butler stood in front of another new dummy5

Princess. It rather looked as though the Department had bulk-bought the new model as a patriotic gesture towards British Leyland's ailing fortunes, he thought irrelevantly.

"Enjoying the game, Jack?"

Butler waited until the batsman had played the ball safely back to the bowler.

"Aye." He gave Audley a quick glance, and then returned to the contemplation of the game. "He's in the car waiting for you."

"Has he said anything more?" Again Butler waited for the sharp snick of the ball on the bat. There was a scatter of clapping from the spectators, though nothing appeared to have happened on the wicket. But then cricket at the level which people like Butler enjoyed it was an arcane pleasure in which a whole afternoon of unrelieved boredom to the uninitiated was an action-packed battle to those who knew what was going on.

"No," said Butler. "Except he asked where we were taking him."

"And you said 'To a cricket match'?"

Butler registered his displeasure by waiting for the delivery of another ball, the last of the over. "And then he demanded to phone his embassy," he concluded heavily.

"But he doesn't seem worried?"

"More angry than worried, I'd say. He won't crack easily."

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"What makes you think so? He ran quickly enough."

For an answer Butler produced an American passport from his pocket and handed it to Audley.

Robert Donaldson. Born: Hartford, Connecticut . . .

"Preacher" Davenport stared up at him.

"It's good." He thumbed through the pages. "It looks perfect."

"It is perfect—perfectly genuine."

"Uh-huh? And Robert Davenport's passport?"

"Just as good. Only the trips are different, nothing else."

"The Paris trips?"

"The Donaldson trips coincide with Charlie Ratcliffe's—while Davenport stayed at home."

Audley nodded slowly. So anyone checking up on Davenport's movements wouldn't equate him with Ratcliffe; Davenport was for public consumption, Donaldson for private comings and goings from different points of entry and exit. It was all nice and simple—and professional. And that was what Butler was telling him, just as the man Maitland had told Butler from his own equally professional observations.

It was a pity a hundred or so reliable witnesses put Preacher Davenport on the wrong side of Swine Brook Field at the right time, but that simply meant he wasn't that sort of professional. And although they had him dead to rights on dummy5

his two passports, that was a minor grief on a much smaller scale beside the things they really wanted him for.

"And yet he ran," Audley frowned at the cricketers.

"Maybe he was ordered to run," said Butler. "Even if he didn't get cold feet himself, maybe his control did—the way we were pushing him. That's happened before now."

His control, thought Audley. There it was, staring him in the face again, what he had begun to suspect and fear ever since Digby's death: that they were playing in a different league from the one he had assumed they were in, and that Charlie Ratcliffe was something very different from the ruthless young political activist he had seemed to be.

It had been there all along, of course. There in the urgency of the Minister's voice; there in the doctored Ratcliffe file; there in the cool efficiency of James Ratcliffe's death; and there even in Frances Fitzgibbon's disquiet at the resources lavished on them for the asking. It had been there, and he had seen it all and ignored it because it didn't fit his childish preconception of the case.

Butler was right, shrewd and perceptive as ever behind that red military face of his: the young American wasn't so much worried about his predicament as angry with it.

Audley stared at him across the confined interior of the car.

He looked younger in the flesh than in any of his pictures, but not so lean; perhaps the leanness had been an illusion dummy5

fostered by the Puritan costume he had affected as

"Preacher" Davenport, but there was something about the bone-structure of his face which suggested that the Preacher's face was the shape of the face to come in full maturity. And then it would truly be an Old Testament face to the very life.

"And just who the hell—" Donaldson began belligerently, and then stopped abruptly, breathing out the rest of his stored anger as a sigh of relief. "Well— am I glad to see you!"

Glad? Audley froze his own face to prevent it betraying his surprise. The last time he'd heard that voice it had been declaiming pure seventeenth-century revolution in the words of Gerard Winstanley out of Frances Fitzgibbon's mini-tape.

It couldn't have nonplussed him more now if it had continued in the same vein.

"Mr. Donaldson?" His opening gambit of polite disbelief already sounded irrelevant. "Or is it Master Davenport?"

The American grinned at him, the laughter lines in his face at odds with those etched by anxiety. "Davenport, Dr. Audley—

Bob Davenport. And I guess I can say I'm pleased to meet you. I've certainly heard a lot about you, sir."

Audley had no choice but to shake the hand offered to him. It had not been his intention to do anything remotely like that, but then it couldn't be said that this harsh interrogation was going exactly to plan.

"Indeed? Well, I wish I could say the same for you, Mr.

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Davenport. So perhaps you could give me another name to reassure me—someone else's name."

Davenport nodded. "Sure. At the embassy here I think Colonel Morris would be your best bet—Colonel Howard Morris. Or Mr. Legrange at The Hague, he's my boss. But I think you know them both, so you can take your pick."

Audley swallowed the lump in his throat. With a couple of casual sentences the ex-Preacher had completely rearranged the pieces of the jigsaw—and in doing so had made them fit as they had never fitted before. The professionalism which Butler and Maitland had sensed, those suspicious trips to Paris in Charlie Ratcliffe's wake, the precipitate withdrawal to Holland when it looked as though his cover had been blown. . . . Even the fact that he was talking freely now when he'd maintained his innocence with everyone else —it all added up to the same coherent pattern.

But the emerging picture was not the one on the lid of the box.

"For choice Colonel Morris," Davenport concluded.

Of course. He could imagine the final briefing almost word for word: if things go wrong play it cool until you reach one of their senior men. If Audley's back from Washington try for him, he's the closest we've got to a friend over there, and he and Morris understand the real score—if they can cover for you, they will. . . .

"I see. But your control is in Holland?"

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"Yes, sir."

That was what had thrown Butler. At a pinch they might have been able to identify the CIA's men in Paris, or even Brussels, but the station in The Hague was small and unimportant, more a presence than an operational centre.

"Then you're out of your territory, Mr. Davenport—and out of line. We have an agreement with your people about manpower. And also we have an agreement about keeping out of our domestic hair: Charlie Ratcliffe is our problem, not yours."

"Yes, sir." The young American nodded. "But as to your first point, we also have a 'hot pursuit' agreement with you, if I may remind you, sir—"

"You may." That "sir" was beginning to make Audley feel old and school-masterish, especially when added to the "heard a lot about you" line. It was one thing for the Minister to use those words, but quite another for this boy to echo them as though he was already a living legend from the past. "You may, but it won't wash. You've been over here for months, and you haven't been looking for Ratcliffe, you've been watching him. And even if you had been pursuing him he's still ours. He's domestic."

"No, sir—with respect."

"Damn the respect." This was what Audley had feared, that part of the jigsaw where Charlie Ratcliffe fitted in with the activities of the CIA. Because there could only be one reason dummy5

for that—the reason which explained the professional precision of the killings of James Ratcliffe and Henry Digby.

All he needed now was final confirmation of that mathematical certainty.

"Well ... I guess we may have stretched the agreement a piece." Davenport grinned apologetically. "But it was pursuit

—it didn't start here ... for us, that is—it started when he made contact with this guy we'd been watching in Paris—"

"KGB?"

"Oh sure—and top brass too. But don't ask me who, because they didn't tell me—" Davenport qualified the admission before Audley could pounce on it "—they pulled me in to establish the next link in the operational chain."

"Because you weren't known here?"

"Or in Paris. They got too many of our men tagged over there. . . . Plus I had the right educational profile. Early colonial history just happened to be my hobby— it's not such a jump from New England to Old England. The guys who emigrated and the guys who stayed and made the colonies, they weren't so different, you know."

For once history was no temptation to Audley. "Yes, I'm sure they weren't. But I'm a little more interested in a more modern history, Master Davenport."

Davenport looked suitably contrite— and very young.

Davenport, little Frances . . . Mitchell . . . even Charlie Ratcliffe—he was trapped in a world of young people who dummy5

seemed to know better what they were about than he did.

Well, they would grow old in their turn.

All except Henry Digby, who would never grow old. He would simply be forgotten.

But not yet, by God, not yet!

"But my job was strictly informational, sir." The young American was looking at him uncertainly now: perhaps he'd misinterpreted the expression which the memory of Henry Digby had stamped on the living legend's face, glimpsing hatred and anger behind the mask.

Or perhaps he hadn't misinterpreted it altogether after all, thought Audley with a flash of self-knowledge. Because this was one time when vengeance was going to make duty a pleasure.

"Even after Swine Brook Field?"

"After the hit?" Davenport was more cautious now. "Well, that only made it more interesting."

"Who made the hit?"

"We don't know for sure." Davenport scratched his head.

"But we think it must have been a guy named Tokaev. He works out of Paris, but he was out of circulation at the time—

and he speaks English perfectly . . . with a slight Cockney accent, that is." He nodded. "'Fact, we're pretty certain, really. It's his style."

"And you found that merely . . . interesting?"

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"Not merely—very. We still didn't know what Ratcliffe was up to, his cover's goddamn good."

But they'd watched him for months nevertheless. The KGB

Paris contact must have been top brass indeed for that.

"Not until the gold turned up, anyway," continued Davenport. "Then we knew, of course. With that sort of finance he can really get The Rat off the ground, and with the dirt they can feed him he can pick his targets. . . . But I guess you know all that better than we do." He gave Audley a rueful look. "When it comes to cover your boys are no slouches either: until you cracked down a week ago we didn't think you were on to him at all."

"Until the gold turned up," Audley repeated the words mechanically.

"Yeah." Davenport shook his head admiringly. "You've got to hand it to the bastards—that was goddamn smart. Goddamn smart."

The distant sound of clapping intruded into Audley's consciousness, as though the cricket crowd agreed with Davenport. Someone had scored or someone was out.

Someone had scored sure enough: the Russians— £2½

million in good clean honest untainted money, for no losses.

He nodded wisely at Davenport. "Yes, I have to agree with you there. And all good genuine seventeenth-century Spanish gold too. That threw us, I can tell you."

"Hah!" Davenport gave a short laugh. "Well, they've dummy5

obviously still got enough of it to pick the genuine article out of stock. But then Krivitsky said at the time that when they unloaded the stuff at Odessa in '36 there was enough of it to cover Red Square from end to end, and he had that from one of the NKVD men who was on the quayside. And some of that gold must have been in store in Madrid for centuries."

Dear God! thought Audley despairingly —how could they have been so stupid, so short-memoried! The Spanish Civil War gold—the gold of the embattled republic which Azana and Prieto had despatched to Russia for safe keeping in October, 1936, and which had turned all subsequent Soviet aid to Spain into a profitable deal that would have brought a blush to any Capitalist cheek; the gold—the Spanish gold—

which had been such a bonanza that Stalin had announced shortly after that new mines had been found in the Urals, the old blackguard!

The Spanish gold which hadn't been found at all in the crater behind the bastion, but which had been planted there.

There was the full design at last. And all the elaborate tapestry of history they had woven was a lie: Matthew Fattorini's honest facts about cargoes and voyages, Nayler's painstakingly assembled inferential evidence, Paul Mitchell's elegant research . . . even his own smug reconstruction of how Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had schemed to conceal their gold—all that was a lie, a self-deception, an edifice built with moonbeams and shadows.

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The reality—as recalled by the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in the West for the benefit of the Saturday Evening Post before SMERSH had caught up with him in a Washington hotel—the reality was a convoy of lorries from Madrid to Cartagena, and then an old freighter with its name painted out steaming slowly from there to Odessa, and then the train to Moscow and the Kremlin vaults.

And then, forty years later, a fraction of the loot had travelled West again, to finance another risky but potentially profitable operation. . . .

Audley superimposed the reality on the lie and came to the instant conclusion that the lie was more convincing. If Spanish gold, the gold of King Philip's Americas, had to end up in the kitchen garden of a great house in England, it should more likely have come via the son of a Devon sea-dog than by the order of a nameless Russian bureaucrat in some dusty office in Dzerzhinsky Street.

But, by the same token, when the KGB could summon up a man who could twist English history to his own use—and even the CIA could conjure up an agent who knew the difference between New England and Old England—then the English themselves ought to be able to screw them both into the ground.

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I elect myself for that job, decided Audley dispassionately.

And I shall break the rules to do it, if that's the only way it can be done.

Davenport was looking at him with a mixture of hope and expectation in his expression—the hope of freedom and the expectation that the legend would justify his reputation. It would be wrong to disappoint him.

"Well, Master Davenport, you've messed us up properly—I can tell you that for free," he said.

Davenport's lip drooped. "Once I was out you would have been given everything we had."

"But you aren't out. And we thought you were Charlie Ratcliffe's action man, maybe. So who is—can you give us that?"

Davenport blinked. "Sure. If it's a trade, that is."

"Part of a trade. You're not in a good trading position, but I'm inclined to be generous. I wouldn't like to see Howard Morris sent back home on the next plane." Audley smiled.

"Okay. He has two guys to hold his hand."

"In his—ah—his regiment?"

"No. In one of the militia regiments."

Well, well!

"David Bishop and Philip Oates, I presume?"

Davenport looked crestfallen. "You know them already?"

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"Confirmation is always helpful. No one else?"

"I don't think so. But they're good operators—very careful. I'd guess they have instructions not to let him do anything, which pisses him off some I suspect."

"He sees himself as a man of action, eh?"

Small shrug. "He's been playing things close to his chest ever since Swine Brook Field, doing what he's been told. But I think you've shaken him up a bit this last week, with what you've been doing."

"Doing nothing isn't to his taste, eh?"

"Right."

So the editor of The Red Rat was pining to be a power in the land, the well-informed scourge of the enemies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

"And where does Professor Stephen Nayler figure in this grand design?"

"Oh, he's just window-dressing. Give him a TV programme and he'll kiss anyone's ass." Davenport's contempt warmed Audley's heart. "He's a punk, but he's clean—we looked him over good."

That was almost the last loose end tied up, thought Audley.

All he had to do now was to tie all the ends in a new knot somehow.

"Well, that almost makes the trade, Master Davenport," he said.

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"I'm glad to hear it." Davenport breathed out. "I shall be sorry to miss Standingham though. That should be quite a show, and I've gotten to enjoy the Double R Society—there are a lot of good people in it."

Audley smiled. "Oh, but you're not going to miss it—almost a trade, I said. I'm going to lose your extra passport and forget the breaking of our agreements, but there are things I need you to do first . . . after I've phoned Colonel Morris and talked to one or two other people. Nothing very difficult, certainly nothing very dangerous. But I want you there on the battlefield, preaching the revolution. It wouldn't be the same without you now, would it?"

He skirted the crowd unobtrusively, weaving in and out of the cars parked under the trees and the picnic groups among them. It surprised him, how many people there were, often whole families, able and willing to spend a whole weekday afternoon watching a cricket match. A rugger crowd he could understand, that was a contest of mind and muscle he enjoyed himself; and a football crowd, that was a statistical fact to be accepted, so there had to be more in it than met his eye. But cricket, that was a pleasant surprise.

His pulse quickened as he spotted Weston's car in the shadow of the trees beyond the old bandstand, and then Weston himself standing very still in the angle of the steps and the wooden balustrade of the stand.

The Superintendent was, if not the only unpredictable factor dummy5

left, the last of the tools he required to handle Charlie Ratcliffe at Standingham. At a pinch he could probably do without Weston, but then he would have to give Weston's task to someone from the Department, and that might enable someone within it to ask awkward questions afterwards.

Whereas if he had Weston and Frances and Davenport all doing their own different things— the police, the Department and the CIA— it was an odds-on certainty that they would never be in a position to exchange notes, and would never therefore be in a position to understand what they had done between them.

Weston was looking at him now. . . . Well, to be honest with himself, they might each of them suspect. Frances possibly, Davenport probably, and Weston . . . Weston, being Weston, for sure, but without proof—only Charlie Ratcliffe would be able to supply that, and that was the one thing Charlie would be in no position to do.

But that thought armed him now for what he had to say. It was better to have

Weston doing something for him than to leave him to his own devices. After what had happened to Sergeant Digby and with what he might already suspect, a copper like Weston would never rest quiet and easy.

The look on Weston's face confirmed his fear. There was no mistaking the policeman for any tinker, tailor, schoolmaster or country doctor now: advancing on that look he knew how Prince Rupert's cavalry had felt when they saw the sun glint dummy5

on the swords of Cromwell's Ironsides.

"Weston."

"Audley." The courtesies were minimal. "You've got a lot of explaining to do, I'm thinking."

"No." Audley shook his head. "Not to you."

The jaw squared. "If not to me, then to my chief."

"Not to him either. Sergeant Digby died in the execution of his duty while questioning two suspected terrorists who subsequently blew themselves up by accident. That was nothing to do with me— now or ever. The case isn't closed for me because it was never open."

Weston stared at him in silence for a moment or two, then took a sheet of paper from his breast pocket.

"Read it." He held out the paper. "Read it, Audley."

Audley opened the sheet. It was close-typed on cheap official paper, the words cutting across the faint blue lines beneath.

'Right worshippfule Sir, Whereas of late have I suceeded to thee Estate wherof mine Fathyr was seised there cameth into myne possessioun alsoe a certeyne quantitie of treasure the whych did my Faither take from a certeyn Papisticalle shippe.

But wheras at thatte tyme for inasmuch as his Majestic hadde mayd treatie and peace with thee king of Spayne it beseemed to hime not opportune to advertise thee whych and he caused itte to be hydden and to noo manne tolde he of it bethynking himme that as tyme showld shewe dummy5

himme when and uppon what occasion he sh'd makke it knowne but he feeling thee comyng nighe of Dethe did tell mee of it.

And as nowe thee Lorde, to whom bee al prayse, hathe shewn unto mee the waye of righteousness and that Parliement doth strive mightilie in Hisse cause ageynst the wrongdoyng and persecution of the righteous by thee evil counselours of his Majestic it seemeth too me that trewe Religion and thee cause of Parliement requireth of mee that I sh'd place this treasyre atte the disposal and use of thee Lord's true servents as so vast a tresure the whych I doe assure Your excellencie nor never in the tyme of her late Grace did come into thisse realm beying twoe thousande pounds weght of golde.

But as certyn shyps thee whych adhere to thee cause of his Majestic make uncertain thee passage twixt Devonshyr and London it seemeth to mee it were not wise to sendyth so grete an cargo by see tho' thatte were in othyr time thee suryst route.

Wherforre will I brynge it mineself bye lande untoe yr Excellencie thatte it maye serve wel as maibe thee cause of thee Lorde and hys Righteouse to bee of use and servyce suche as seemeth wel to y'rselfe.