Colonel Butler's Wolf (8 page)

“To what?”

Audley laughed. “Why, to my going back to university to see if there really were any wolf-prints round the fold.”

“And were there ?”

The laugh faded quickly. “You decide that for yourself in due course, Butler.”

Butler stared at the big man speculatively. There were quite a number of things he hadn’t passed on. Or maybe couldn’t pass them on because he didn’t know them. But asking wouldn’t make him change his mind. In any case, however fanciful Sir Geoffrey Hobson’s nightmares might be, Eden Hall had been no fancy.

“Very well. But I can’t see how I can achieve anything that you can’t do better. You’re already accepted in the academic world.”

“That’s just it: I am accepted. And believe me that’s worth a great deal. My position is just too valuable to compromise just yet.”

He bobbed up and down as though agreeing unexpectedly with himself. “Didn’t Fred and Stocker warn you that we have to go very carefully?”

“They did—yes,” growled Butler. “Stocker mentioned Dutschke. And there seems to be a petition of some sort floating around.”

“Ha! You can say that again!” murmured Audley. “I’ve signed it myself.
And
I’m a member of the Cumbrian branch of the Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy too— a perfectly worthy institution. But unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of clever friends of mine who can’t distinguish between wolves and sheepdogs when they set about protecting their flocks—and there are some who think there isn’t any difference anyway. They shoot on sight, and some of ‘em are pretty good marksmen, I warn you, Butler.”

He gazed at Butler quizzically. “Did Stocker ask you what you thought about the younger generation ?”

“Yes.”

Audley sniffed. “Load of nonsense! He talks about the younger generation as though it was a political party with lifelong membership. And I think he’s frightened of it.”

“Whereas you aren’t?” murmured Butler. There might be something in what Audley said, but it went against the grain to agree with him when he was laying down the law like this.

“They’re too inexperienced to be dangerous at the moment. And by the time they’ve picked up the know-how, then life has moved them on, poor devils. As a rule they’re no match for the terrible old men on the other side.”

“You’re sympathetic to them, then?”

“Sympathetic? My dear Butler—the girls are delicious, with their little tight bottoms, and the boys are splendid when they’re arrogant—and when they’ve washed their hair. But when they forget they’re individuals and try to be the Youth of Today I find them extraordinarily tedious and self-defeating.”

“I was under the impression that they were giving the university authorities a run for their money.”

“Oh—quite often they do. That is, when the authorities make mistakes. And it’s just like our business, my dear fellow: only the mistakes get the headlines. That’s part of the reason why Stocker and Fred are sweating—what happens in the universities is news. The other part is that there’s still a lot of influence in the universities as well as a lot of brains. And they know how to use it too. We’re an example of that.”

“We are?”

“My dear Butler, we’re here because the Master of King’s knows which string to pull. Take my advice and forget about the younger generation. Think about the older one instead: think about the Master of King’s.”

He gave a little admiring grunt. “The Hobsons have been a power in Oxford for a century—you can see them planted in rows in St Cross churchyard. It’ll be like a family reunion when the last trump sounds there. And our Sir Geoffrey’s the second Hobson to be Master of King’s. They say the first one had a niece who was Beerbohm’s model for Zuleika. They also say old Hobson was the model for the Warden of Judas. There’s also a story that Old Hob once made a guest at High Table take the college snuff, and when the poor chap fell dead of apoplexy (King’s snuff being fearful stuff) all the old villain said was ‘At least he took snuff once before he died!’.”

Audley chuckled, savouring the anecdote, and then checked himself as he caught Butler’s disapproving look. “Yes … well, Young Hob, as they call the present Master—he’s nearly 70, actually—he’s a man who likes to work indirectly. That’s why he approached me through Theodore Freisler.”

“He intended to get through to you?”

“No shadow of doubt about it. To me through Theodore and then to Sir Frederick through me. I tell you, he prefers the indirect approach.”

And also the approach that protected him best from any awkward questions if things went wrong, thought Butler. Except that that meant the Master was a worried man as well as a careful one, a man who truly believed his own warnings of doom. And as Stocker and Sir Frederick were disposed to take him seriously it might be that this business could suddenly turn into a very hot potato indeed.

The conclusions presented themselves to Butler one after another in quick succession, last of all the most daunting one: hot potatoes were objects to pass on as smartly as possible.

“Why hasn’t the Department handed over all this to the Special Branch?”

“The Special Branch is not involved,” Audley snapped. “And we damn well want it to stay that way—uninvolved.”

His prickliness took Butler aback. If there was one thing the Department prided itself on, it was those hard-won cooperative relations with the Branch.

But the reaction wasn’t lost on Audley. “I know it’s not how we usually go about things. But the Branch has its sticky fingers in student politics, and we don’t want any part of that. The young blighters can sit-in or sit down as much as they like. They can lie down for all we care, if that’s what turns them on. Provided it’s all their own idea, not something somebody else wants them to do to further some other idea.”

“Somebody being the Russians.”

“Russians, Martians—it doesn’t matter who. But in this case the Russians, yes.”

Butler scowled. “What the hell do they hope to get out of it?”

Audley maintained a poker face. “Perhaps the Master of King’s will be able to tell you. But I can tell you what
we
stand to lose.”

“What?”

“Just suppose the Press got hold of Comrade Zoshchenko. It’s bad enough the way the public feels about the students as it is. But what price the Council for Academic Freedom if someone came up with a genuine subversion story? Christ, man—it’d set higher education back years. And then we’d have a real student problem on our hands.”

Butler nodded slowly. There might or might not be a plot of some sort, though he found it hard to believe even now, after Eden Hall. But there was the makings of a spectacular scandal, that was certain. And from such a scandal one might expect a fierce anti-student backlash.

If that was the aim it was clever, but not new. Indeed, it was no more than another version of the technique being used at the very moment by the IRA gunmen in Northern Ireland:
Make your enemy repressive. And if he isn
’
t so by nature, make him so by provocation.

“Then why haven’t they blown the gaff on Zoshchenko already?” he asked suddenly, as the thought struck him.

Audley shook his head. “That’s what really scares me, Butler. Because it means that scandal isn’t their objective, it’s just something extra we’ve got to worry about. I’ve a feeling that they must be playing for much higher stakes than that. And I can tell you—I don’t like the feeling one little bit.”

IT WAS A
very small gap through which Neil Smith had broken into Pett’s Pond, and thereby from Earth to Heaven— or to wherever would give houseroom to Paul Zoshchenko.

Indeed, it had hardly been a gap at all, more the sort of dog-eared hole small boys made at their natural break-in point where the hedge and the council’s road safety fence met. Even now, when it had been enlarged and trampled, it was insignificant: a very small gap.

Butler retraced his steps carefully along the soggy bank, ducking under the spindly alder branches, and heaved himself back to the roadside. As he steadied himself on the splintered end of the fence he felt the post move under his hand. Either it had been already loose, or maybe Smith had given it a passing clout on his way to the pond: it was impossible to say, because every mark of his passage had been overprinted with other people’s slide and slither.

But he had expected no less, and it had not been for any tangible clues that he had broken his journey at Pett’s Pool. If there was anything to be had here it lay in the trained memories of Charon’s assistants, the local constable and the police surgeon.

The first of these stood waiting for him beside the Rover, well-built, fresh-faced, stamping his boots on the gravel like a young carthorse impatient at having to stand still when the day’s work still lay ahead of him.

“Not much to see there,” Butler said gruffly, brushing down his overcoat ineffectually.

“Too much, sir. Half the village was there before me!”

No apologies, that was a good sign. When Smith’s body had been spotted by schoolchildren taking their short cut along the far margin of the pond the Constable had been measuring up an early morning collision two or three miles away. Now he was making no bones about it, trusting Butler to know that a man couldn’t be everywhere, and was therefore seldom at the right spot.

“They had him out and they tried to give him the kiss of life, sir. And they spotted his motor-cycle in the water—it’s not very deep anywhere and there was a big patch of oil on the surface—so they looked to see if there was anyone ridin’ pillion.”

Butler looked at the stagnant pond with distaste. One public-spirited soul had stripped off and groped among the weeds, while another, even braver, had set his mouth to those cold lips, an act as admirable as it had been useless.

With a shrug he turned his back on the pond and stared up and down the empty road. From this point on to the bend he had a clear view in both directions for two hundred yards or more. Ahead of him the road ran straight into the open countryside and to his left the first of the cottages of the village was tucked among the trees perhaps fifty yards beyond the further tip of the crescent-shaped stretch of water behind him.

“Nobody heard anything?”

“No, sir,” the Constable shook his head. “Old Mr Catchpole in the last house there—he’s half deaf anyway, so he has his television switched on full. He was watching Match of the Day until about 11 and then the midnight film until 12.55, so he wouldn’t have heard it.”

“That was when it happened?”

“Dr Fox said it might have been about then. If you want to have a word with him—“

“All in good time, constable.” Everything pointed to the young fellow’s efficiency—he had taken the trouble to talk to the occupant of the nearest house on the off-chance of evidence, even in an open-and-shut road accident. So perhaps an off-chance lay in him too—“What do you think happened?”

The constable looked at him doubtfully. Open-and-shut it might have seemed, but it wouldn’t seem like that to him now, with a mysterious Colonel Butler nosing about, armed with exalted Home Office credentials and authorisation from the Chief Constable himself. But an outsider nonetheless, and it would be dead against his training and inclination to hypothesise to such a person, colonel or not.

Butler assumed the interested expression of a seeker after wisdom. Evidently the marrow would have to be coaxed from this bone.

“Has there ever been an accident here before?”

The constable relaxed slightly. “About ten years ago there was a bus went off the road. That was long before my time of course, but I’ve heard tell of it enough times. He was going too fast, the driver—that’s the reason for nine out of ten of the accidents I’ve seen, when you come down to it, sir—but it’s true the bend’s much sharper than it seems, more a corner than a bend, and the camber’s not good at all. So it seems like he just drifted into it gradually—went into the pond down there—“ he pointed towards the village.

“And that was when the council put up the fence and the reflectors—you can’t rightly miss ‘em as you come into the bend—and the Ministry put up the warning signs too. So there’s been nothing gone amiss since then. I wouldn’t say it was dangerous at all.”

That was the thing in a nutshell: the bend was at worst a minor hazard, but no killer. The moment a driver began to go into it at night those red reflectors would glare back warningly; even the ill-fated bus had almost managed the unexpected curve successfully.

“But young Smith found it dangerous, didn’t he?” murmured Butler.

“Sir?” The constable frowned.

“The motor-cyclist,” began Butler patiently. “If he came down the straight and went through the gap just there … it looks as though he never even started to turn into the bend … “

“Ah … well now … “ It was not so much a conjecture as a problem when put like that, and the constable’s reluctance to tackle it was weakening “ … it does look a bit like that when you think about it.”

And he was thinking about it now. He looked up the straight and then to the gap, eyes narrowed, and finally at the pond itself. Then back up the straight again. “You see, sir, there was no brake mark and no skid mark. Yet he came down fast—that’s sure enough, for the motor-bike was well out in the water. And—“ he paused “—and now I come to think of it, well, it wasn’t quite where I’d have expected it … “

“Indeed?”

The constable nodded judiciously. “If he was taking the corner, or just beginning to, it should have ended up further to the right—the right, that is, as we’re lookin’ at the pond from here. But it was two, maybe three yards to the left of that … So it’s like you said, sir—if you asked me I’d say he came directly down the road and straight across through the hedge like there was no corner at all—“

He stopped suddenly, glancing at Butler nervously again as though expecting a reprimand.

“I think you’re quite right, constable,” said Butler encouragingly, ignoring the glance. “We have the two fixed points—the gap in the hedge and the position of the machine in the pond—and if we imagine a back-bearing from them we ought to have his angle of approach. You’re absolutely right!” He paused to let his praise sink in. “But how would he come to do a thing like that?”