Colonel Butler's Wolf (11 page)

“Then I differ from you, Butler. These were a dozen or two of tomorrow’s foremost men in their fields, in industry and government and politics. I’d be inclined to call that a fair return for very little outlay—much better return than some expensive spy ring set up to obtain a few petty secrets. And secrets are soon outdated; this would be in the nature of an investment, don’t you think?”

Or maybe a pilot project, thought Butler, impressed a little despite his misgivings. If such a thing could be done successfully in Britain, where conformity and a clean sheet was not yet an absolute key to high advancement, what might not be achieved in the far more vulnerable and sensitive upper levels of American society?

To pinpoint the best men—the coming men—and make sure they never arrived …

Sir Geoffrey was watching him narrowly now.

“Well, Colonel Butler?”

“Hmm!” Butler cleared his throat. “We’ll look into it, Master. But in the meantime—tell me about Zoshchenko.”

“Zoschenko?” The Master’s expression saddened. “Zoshchenko … I still find it hard to think of him as anyone other than Neil Smith. Indeed, if it was not my own testimony— if you were now telling me what I told Freisler—you might find me hard to convince.”

“You knew him well?”

“Well? Not well, perhaps, but I liked what I knew. He was a likeable fellow, good-humoured but mature in his way. He seemed older than his years—“

“He probably was older.”

“Yes … yes, I suppose he might have been. But he was still young—a
jolly
young man, if I may use a somewhat archaic word.”

“Convivial?”

“A drinker? No, hardly that. I rather think it was part of the joke that everyone called him ‘Boozy’ when his friends relied on him to drive them home.”

“He was popular, then?”

“He joined in the social life of the college certainly. Rowed bow in the second eight, and played a bit of rugger I believe. And he was president of the college’s de Vere Society, which prides itself on balancing culture with athletic pursuits.”

“And he was a scholar.”

“An exhibitioner. He had a good mind, but steady rather than brilliant—if he’d been less clever one might put him down as a plodder. But he was no plodder—plodders don’t often get first-class degrees, you know. But I rather think teaching was more in his line than research.”

“That was why I had no hesitation in recommending him to Gracey at Cumbria—Gracey is one of the few provincial vice-chancellors who are determined on quality rather than quantity in his student body, and I believed that Smith … that is, Zoschenko … was just the man for him.”

The Master sighed heavily, though whether at his own error or at Zoschenko’s betrayal of his confidence it was impossible to judge.

“And you never for one moment suspected that he might have any hand in the—ah—plot you suspected?”

Sir Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. “I never came upon him singing the Red Flag if that’s what you mean,” he murmured drily.

“I mean—“ Butler began sharply and then blunted the anger in his voice as he saw the glint in the Master’s eye “—I mean did he take part in politics here?”

“His politics were to the left of centre. He wasn’t a communist—“ The Master stopped abruptly. “I should say he gave no indication that he was a communist. I would have described him as a liberal socialist, equally anti-communist and anti-fascist.”

Butler snorted. “Do you find that surprising?”

“Not in the least.” Sir Geoffrey regarded him equably now. “It’s fashionable to be a political animal up here. Not all the best of the young are left-wingers, but some of the cleverest certainly are. So he was neither extreme nor unusual.”

“It wasn’t as if he was going into the government service either. He had an academic career ahead of him and a moderate left-wing involvement wouldn’t have damaged his chances. More likely it would have made him a more useful senior member later on.”

Butler nodded. Deep down Sir Geoffrey still could not quite believe in Smith’s duplicity, or was unwilling to believe in it in spite of his own knowledge. But in fact Zoshchenko’s political cover had been simple commonsense.

“How did he come to you—to the college?”

“Through UCCA in the normal way. That is, through the University Central Council for Admissions. The only complication, as I remember, was that the last years of his secondary education had been in New Zealand. But that was no great problem really, his parents were dead, but they’d left him enough money to put himself through one of the cramming establishments over here. He had a letter from his headmaster in New Zealand and another from an Anglican bishop out there.”

“Forged, naturally. Or stolen.”

The Master shrugged. “He had enough ‘O’ levels, and when he’d taken our scholarship examination we jumped at him. He was a promising man, as I’ve said.”

It was too easy, all too easy: it was like taking candy from a baby. Audley had mentioned that UCCA was about to computerise itself, but as it was the checking was minimal. Up here the good brain validated the credentials: nobody really cared about a man’s origins, but only about his potential. After all, it was a university, not a top security establishment.

That had been Audley’s final comment—and it didn’t seem to worry him very much either. But it made Butler shiver as he remembered Sir Geoffrey’s contemptuous dismissal of the student files controversy : rather was there a near-criminal lack of guards at the gates of these ivory towers. Small wonder they had enemies within!

And yet—damn and blast it—these were
British
ivory towers, Butler told himself angrily. Freedom from the interference of bureaucratic snoopers ought to be part of a Briton’s birthright: it was only the lesser breeds who were hounded by their ever-suspicious masters.

Butler cocked his head as the thought developed inside it: that might even be near the heart of this part of the problem … it might very well be the heart itself.

A good mind, a steady mind—Hobson would not be wrong about that. And a good, steady mind which had been exposed to three years of Oxford.

“Would you say he was a young man of independent mind?”

“Sm— Zoshchenko?”

“Perhaps we’d do better to call him Smith.” He was forgetting Audley’s exhortation already. “Was he a man of independent mind?”

“Independent … “ The Master examined the word. “No, hardly that. He was too young to be truly independent, whatever he may have thought.”

“Isn’t that what you teach them to be here?”

“Teach them?” Sir Geoffrey almost chuckled. “We don’t
teach
them. They have to reach their destination under their own steam—we merely point them in the general direction of truth.”

It was difficult to tell whether he was joking. But then, as he stared at Butler, the meaning of the questions came home to him, and the sparse eyebrows raised in surprise.

Butler nodded.

“God bless my soul!” muttered Sir Geoffrey. “You mean to imply that we succeeded with him ?”

It wouldn’t have been a sudden blinding flash on the road to Damascus, thought Butler. With that good, steady mind it might have been no more than a small nagging doubt at first —a small thing compared with the pleasure of pulling the wool over the eyes of all these clever old men. But what he would not have known was that the clever men were working on him too: that the tiny doubt was a poison working and spreading inside him, working and growing as he was admitted to their ranks until—

Until what?

Never mind that for the time being. Whatever it was, it had been just that bit too much for him; he had become one of them, the man with his own Cause—or at least the Cause of Holy Russia, buried deep inside him, and the division of loyalties had split his Slav temperament right down the middle … Wasn’t it Hamlet that the Russians so enjoyed, with its dark vein of self-destruction?

Butler himself had no time for Hamlet, who seemed to him to have been in a fair way of doing damn all in cold blood until his uncle’s stupid treachery had given him the hot-blooded excuse for action.

But that was how the thing might have happened, with some final dirty instruction pushing poor Zoshchenko-Smith to resolve his dilemma with a drunken motor-cycle ride through the night—a sort of motorised Russian roulette.

Certainly, everything he had found out so far, from Pett’s Pond to King’s chapel, bore out that theory.

“And that would mean that in effect he committed suicide ?” said Sir Geoffrey, staring at him.

“I seem to remember that you suggested as much in your letter. Does it surprise you now?”

Sir Geoffrey gestured peevishly. “So I did, so I did! But in retrospect I felt that it was not wholly in character. It was— how can I put it—an
inexact
way of approaching the problem. Not like Smith, at all.”

“But perhaps like Zoshchenko, Master. You must remember that we’re dealing with two men now, not one. And neither of them was quite himself.” Butler paused. “Besides, if it was like that it wasn’t truly suicide—at least not when he set out. It was more like daring fate to settle things for him— maybe he had his own people on his tail by then and he knew he was on his way to betraying everything he’d worked for.”

“His own people? You mean the KGB or something like that?”

Butler shrugged. “Something like that.”

“Could they have been responsible, Butler?”

“Honestly, Master—I think not. There’s no evidence of it as yet. But to be sure of it I’d need to talk to someone much closer to him than you’ve been. Do you know of anyone who fills that bill ? He had friends, you say?”

“Hmm … “ Sir Geoffrey frowned heavily into space. “I do indeed, Butler—I do indeed.”

He raised his eyes to Butler’s, still frowning, and then fell silent again.

Butler thought: the old devil started this business and now he doesn’t like the way the wind’s blowing—the more so because it’s blowing down his neck.

“I know this must be distasteful to you, sir,” he said aloud, desperately trying to stop obsequiousness from seeping into his voice. “But we have to know, one way or another—“

“I don’t need you to tell me my duty, Colonel Butler. Or to threaten me with your one way or another. It’s simply that the person who fills your bill exactly happens to be the daughter of a very old friend of mine. It seems—though I wasn’t aware of it until after the man’s death—that there was an engagement in the air.”

“
With Smith?
”

“So it seems.” The words came out with reluctance. “Is it possible that you can … speak to her without revealing the man’s true identity?”

“I’d prefer to do it that way.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.” Sir Geoffrey relaxed. “I wouldn’t like to see Polly Epton hurt again—and not like that.”

Epton.

They hadn’t suspected Smith and they didn’t know much about him—Audley had admitted as much, and that was nothing less than the truth, by God !

“Epton?” Butler repeated casually. “Would that be the Castleshields Eptons?”

“That’s right. Charles Epton’s daughter. She’s an occupational therapist here—I suppose that’s how she met Smith. And then she must have met him again up north.”

That changed things, thought Butler. They had been convinced that something had tipped Smith over the edge, but it had never occurred to anyone that the thing might be a woman.

He hadn’t bargained on a woman.

Damned women!

He was jerked back to reality by Sir Geoffrey’s voice, its tone edged with bitter complaint.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said ‘what a waste’, Colonel Butler.”

“Of Miss Epton, Master?”

“No, man—of Smith. He had a good mind. What a waste!”

“I couldn’t agree more.”
Damned women.

HE RECOGNISED THE
symptoms only too well.

To start with he had had trouble making up his mind, and then, when he had belatedly come to a decision, he had consciously made the wrong choice.

Although his usually healthy appetite had suddenly deserted him (and that was another symptom too) he knew very well that in the field it was always best to eat when the opportunity presented itself. So reason decreed that he ought to stoke up with the hot sausages the pub was serving, or some of the serviceable veal and ham pie, or even the bread and cheese and pickled onions.

Yet here he sat, staring sourly into his second whiskey and soda, knowing that it wasn’t doing him the least good.

It wasn’t that he was a misogynist, he told himself for the thousandth time. It was patently irrational to hate them all because of the gross betrayal and infidelity of one.

It was simply that he knew he didn’t understand them. Or rather, he knew that understanding women was a skill given to some and not others, like the ability to judge the flight of a cricket ball instinctively. Or maybe it was like tone deafness and colour blindness.

But whatever it was, he hadn’t got it. And without it he feared and distrusted himself, and was ashamed.

He looked again at his watch. Sir Geoffrey had seemed confident that he could arrange a rendezvous for this place and time, and his duty to interview her was inescapable: if the rumour of that unofficial engagement were true she ought to know more about Smith’s state of mind than anyone else, though he was hardly the best man to extract her information.

He snorted with self-contempt and reached out for his glass.

“Colonel Butler.”

Whatever Polly Epton was, she was certainly no slip of a girl; she was a well-built, well-rounded young woman—the American term “well stacked” popped up in Butler’s mind. Indeed, although not conventionally pretty she glowed with such health and wholesomeness that the Americanism was instantly driven out by women’s magazine images of milkmaids, butter churns and thick cream.

It was ridiculous, but he felt himself praying enviously
I
hope my girls grow up like this.

“Colonel Butler?” she repeated breathlessly, and this time a shade doubtfully, as though a certain identification had let her down.