Gunner Kelly (10 page)

“I said he was a civil servant, Chief Inspector.”

“And what does he do?”

“He is a civil servant.” They would know, of course. “He is a procurement advisor on the NATO standardisation committee.”

Andrew half-smiled. “Yes … well, it was from the export director of Anglo-American Electronics, the call was. They specialise in micro-systems for missiles for NATO.”

But why the half-smile? “So it was a genuine call?”

Chief Inspector Andrew shrugged. “Could be.”

“The trouble with David Audley … is that he knows a lot of people, Captain,” said Butler.

“Like the managing director of AAE, for one,” said Andrew. “So, if he was going to check up on you, this is exactly the way he might do it—on the old boy network. But there’s no way we can check up on
that
without spooking him, because the MD there owes him a big favour, and we can’t rely on patriotism being thicker than gratitude in his case, because he’s an American.”

The contradictions of the situation were beginning to confuse Benedikt. In Germany the managing director of a company specialising in NATO missile-systems would be no problem, he would know where his duty lay, and his best interests too. But then in Germany, when Colonel Butler’s opposite number trusted a senior officer to the extent that Colonel Butler trusted Dr David Audley, there would have been no problem to resolve in the first place. It was all very confusing.

Butler had stopped stroking his chin. “Why would he not take you for a soldier?”

That, at least, was easy. He extracted the spectacle-case from his pocket, and the spectacles from the case.

“Soldiers are not half-blind.” He perched the appalling things on his nose. His eyes hurt and the faces of the two men swam in an opaque sea, and he took the spectacles off quickly. “I use them with contact lenses—I became used to them several years ago—” He smiled at Colonel Butler, remembering Sonnenstrand “—in Bulgaria. With contact lenses, it is a matter of growing accustomed to them. Then the glasses by themselves are no problem. Also, with contact lenses and the necessary preparations which go with them, no one questions that I should have all that in my baggage too—they cannot know that the lenses correct the glasses, not the eye-sight, you see.”

“Huh!” Colonel Butler sniffed. “A gimmick.”

“But a convincing one, sir. And not inappropriate for a student of Roman roads.”

Butler remained unconvinced. “But Audley’s no fool. And I didn’t expect him to surface so quickly. I was expecting him to keep in the background.” He shook his head. “So I wouldn’t bet on it—and that gives us less time, I’m afraid … Always supposing that we have any time.”

“The Roman roads weren’t bad, sir,” demurred the Chief Inspector. “He can hardly have been expecting that, for God’s sake! Not in the time we had—”

“Huh!” This time it was more like a growl. “He once passed
me
off as an expert on Roman fortification—or on Byzantine fortification, anyway, which is a damn sight more obscure than Roman roads—and in a damn sight less time, too!” He grimaced reminiscently. “But you couldn’t know that—I doubt whether even Captain Schneider’s computer in Wiesbaden knows it!”

The Colonel was plainly worried about his unimpeachably reliable subordinate, notwithstanding that loyalty-to-the-death. And although that added to Benedikt’s confusion, so far as that was possible, it also fed his instinctive liking for the man: Colonel Butler was a leader out of the same mould as Papa’s idols.

“I don’t know what he made of me, sir.” He came back to the original question. “But I was not the man he was waiting for—that I know.”

“The man?” Colonel Butler forgot his worries. “The man?”

“It could not have been a woman. He would not have come to look at me if I had been the wrong sex.” He stretched what he believed to its limits. “At the worst … he was not sure of me—that I was not doing what I was actually doing … Looking over the place, that is.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I was never alone, sir. From the moment I entered the Chase, there was always someone, I think, who was watching me.” He struggled with the concept. “At the road-block … and in the public house … But there was a man on the hillside—on the ridge—before that… And in the village, when I walked round it, there was this woman on a bicycle who seemed to follow us—”

“Us?”

Benedikt smiled. “There were these two little boys I met, on their racing bicycles—they showed me round … Before lunch they took me to the Roman villa, and afterwards they led me through the village, to the footpath which leads to the Duntisbury Rings—”

Benje had been dismissive
: “She’s just an old nosey-parker—you don’t want to take any notice of her.”

She had been tall and thin, riding a tall and thin bicycle unbalanced by an immense wicker basket resting on her front mudguard. But she had been there behind them, off and on, until the second man had appeared.

“—and after her there was another man—”

The man with the gun couched under his arm, on the skyline.

“That’s Old Levi—from the Almshouses. He lives on boiled sausages, Mum says—and boiled rabbits, when he can bag
one, ‘cause there’re not many of them around … An’ he sleeps in his gumboots, Mum says … Because when they took him into the cottage hospital, when he had ‘flu, they had to cut them off his feet, to get him into bed—yrrrch!”

But Old Levi—(who didn’t look particularly old, from the way he kept up with them; but everyone who wasn’t obviously young was old to Benje and Darren) but Old Levi had paced them, on the skyline and off it, all the way from Duntisbury Rings to Caesar’s Camp, and then down along the possible terrace of the Roman
agger
into the valley, to the sun-dappled pools where the stream idled between the trees—

Another thought struck him, which dove-tailed beautifully with everything else he had said, like the good work of a master carpenter slotting together, yet much more frightening, and much more humiliatingly—

“What’s the matter?” It was the Chief Inspector who had read his face more quickly.

The little boys! thought Benedikt. The little
clever
boys, with their clever and insistent questions—?

But he had clued himself to the answer, with his own remembrance of that village near Leipzig two years ago, when because of his stupidity the Russians and the East Germans had both been close behind him—inescapably close—with the women carrying their sheets off the line, down by another stream, and the children coming back from school, staring at him with huge eyes until the women had sent them about their business as he had slipped away into the trees—

All he had to do was to reverse the situation—he had said as much himself:
I’ve never been in a place like it, not even on the other side
— to become an enemy, not a friend!

But here in England—?

Here in England, too! Yes!

He looked at Chief Inspector Andrew, then at Colonel Butler. “I think I have been stupid, you know.”

They both waited for the end-product of that conclusion.

“It is not that I have given anything away. Perhaps quite the contrary … But I have nevertheless been stupid.”

Suddenly he saw the little girl beside the water-splash, sitting on the footbridge in her grubby dress, and then ducking behind the phone-box. And
then into it
—

“Yes … these two small boys, who accompanied me … not so little, but not big boys …”

“Little boys?” Butler regarded him incredulously.

“They attached themselves to me.” There had been no escape from them then, and there was no escape from them now. “I…I have experience with boys. I have nephews … and I help to run a youth club for the church, in the place where I live, when I am there.” The need for honesty outweighed the burden of his humiliation: in a de-briefing honesty was essential, anything less than the truth mediated against security. “I thought to use them—to ask questions which I could not so easily ask their elders.”

“Yes?” The Special Branch man was there.

“I thought I was cultivating
them
. But now I’m not sure that it wasn’t the other way round—that they were questioning
me …
And that they were watching me more closely than their elders could have done—that the woman, and the second man … they were the back-up, watching over the boys, rather than watching me.”

“Yeah—y
eah!!”
Chief Inspector Andrew at least didn’t find it outrageous. “I’ve seen little kids look out for their elder brothers, on a job … Nothing like this, of course. But if you’ve got a bright kid …” He nodded at Butler.

“God bless my soul!” The Colonel took a moment to adjust to the idea. “Children?”

“These were clever children, sir.” Benedikt himself still couldn’t quite accept the little girl at the water-splash. “They were at… is it ‘secondary school’, you call it?”

“Comprehensive? Grammar?” hazarded Andrew. “Public?”

“It was named after a king of England. And they both learnt Latin.”

“They still learn Latin at comprehensive schools, or some of them do,” said Andrew. “Thank God!”

“They had scholarships—”

“Never mind!” snapped Butler. “What you’re saying … what you are saying is … the whole village?” The adjustment still taxed him, too. “The children … the tractor driver—and the Land Rover driver … the woman on the bicycle, and the man with the shot-gun … ?”

“The petrol-station attendant at the garage,” supplemented Andrew. “Him too. And the publican.”

“And Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith.” The Colonel added to the roll-call. “And Audley.”

Benedikt began to feel foolish. Behind the Iron Curtain was one thing, from the Elbe to the Vistula and along the Danube … But not in England, surely! Or … if in Toxteth and Brixton, maybe … not in Duntisbury Royal, anyway—

Yet Colonel Butler was nodding at his Chief Inspector. “That could be it. Remember how she said ‘we’?‘
We
really have a chance’?”

Benedikt stopped feeling foolish. “A chance of what, sir?”

Butler came back to him. “Let us get this absolutely straight, Captain. You believe, having been to Duntisbury Royal, that they are waiting for a man to arrive there?”

“A man—or men, perhaps.” Benedikt nodded. “Or someone.”

“With hostile intent?”

He could only shrug. “I cannot tell that. But they had no flags out—no garlands of welcome. They wished to be warned of the approach of strangers, and they were concerned to identify such strangers.” In the end he had to commit himself. “What I am saying is … subjective, of course. Since you asked me to look there, I went there looking for something. And there was Audley …”

“And there was Audley.” A corner of the Colonel’s mouth twitched. “And you would know that where Audley goes there is trouble—that would be on your computer.”

“Yes.” No point in denying that, even though Audley had not operated in Germany for many years. He stared at the Colonel. “Hostile intent… yes. Or the intent may be with the stranger. So perhaps defensive intent, sir.”

“And the whole village is involved in this … defensive intent?”

That was still the sticking point. “I did not meet the whole village. It seems … unlikely.”

“Unlikely?”

“In England unlikely. There are places where it would not be unlikely—places where the government of the country is hated, and where strangers are feared and distrusted—where the laws are unjust and oppressive … And also in peasant communities, where there is still traditional leadership and strong feelings of local solidarity. In such places it is the objective of the regime to cut off such leadership and undermine such feelings, but sometimes such efforts have the opposite effect. But… .”

“But?”

“But I do not think I am describing England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Colonel. That is the difficulty.”

Colonel Butler nodded. “Yes. So it is possible that you have imagined all this?” He smiled suddenly. “Not altogether unreasonably … on the basis of your instructions, and the presence of David Audley … and also perhaps because of your own experiences elsewhere, eh?”

“I did not imagine the searching of my baggage.”

“No. But that could have been an ordinary thief—ordinary, but skilful—on the look-out for money and a good German camera. There’s a lot of that about in England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, I’m afraid, Captain.”

Well: there was the challenge. And all the rest of what they had said could have been merely leading him on.

“My car was parked very publicly, outside the public house, beside what passes for the main street in Duntisbury Royal. It would have had to have been a very skilful thief.” Benedikt played for time.

“Oh, we’ve got a few of them.” Chief Inspector Andrew cocked his head ruefully. “They just don’t go around in cloth caps and striped jerseys any more, carrying bags labelled ‘Swag’.”

No more time.

He looked the Colonel in the eye. “No. Duntisbury Royal is different. There is something very wrong there. I cannot prove it, but
I feel
it.” His confidence strengthened as he spoke. “It is … what I feel is … it is a most beautiful and peaceful valley, where the people are kind and helpful—
and I was glad to get out of it in o
ne piece, Colonel
.”

They stared at each other for one more moment, then the Colonel turned to his colleague. “Aye … Well, show him the papers, Andrew. Sheet by sheet, if you please. He’s ready for them now.”

The Special Branch man half-turned, to pick up a grey folder which had been hidden behind him within the jumble of stacked ecclesiastical furniture half-filling the cell. From the folder he passed a single sheet of closely-typed paper to Benedikt.

Herbert George Maxwell was born in 1912, the son of Lieu
tenant-Colonel Julian Robert Maxwell MC, Grenadier Guards, who was killed in action in 1917 shortly after succeeding to command the 2nd/21st West Yorks at Ypres, and who as ‘Robert Julian’ was widely recognised as one of the most lyrical of the war poets w
hile his military identity remained a close secret shared only with a few close friends.