October Men (17 page)

He was almost there, thought Richardson, looking questioningly at his master.

Sir Frederick nodded. “Go on, Peter.”

Richardson met the Special Branch man’s gaze. “It could be. The general description’s about right—height, age and so on. And the clothes are about right. It could very well be.”

Cox relaxed. “I take it you have a body?”

“That’s right.”

One lost and one found. At least the books balanced.

“Suicide or foul play?”

“The verdict will be misadventure, Superintendent,” said Sir Frederick. “As it happens that is not far short of the truth. But officially we shall fail to establish an identity. It will be an unknown intruder for the public record.”

“Might I ask where he was intruding, sir?”

“Dr. Audley’s place down in Hampshire.”

Cox’s face went blank—the books had unbalanced themselves again—and then clouded with surprise.

The change in expression was not lost on Sir Frederick. “Audley had nothing to do with it, Superintendent—at least not directly. He’s … on holiday with his family.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“Relieved?”

“Yes, sir.” Cox was feeling his way circumspectly now; he hadn’t yet been warned off, but he recognised the signs. “I understood he was not a violent man. Off the rugger field, at least. He’s never had a weapon booked out to him.” He paused. “But we do have a security problem now, sir.”

“If the body is Hemingway’s, we do—I agree,” Sir Frederick’s eyes shifted to the Archivist. “What was his security category?”

“Hemingway, sir?” The Archivist looked startled.

“Yes, Mr. Benbow.”

“Grade Four, sir.”

It was Sir Frederick’s turn to look surprised: Grade Four was hardly a security category at all. If the man who delivered the morning milk to the building had needed a category, that would have been it.

“I didn’t know we had any Grade Fours here.”

“He didn’t handle anything requiring a higher clearance, sir. And he wasn’t authorised to go above the ground floor.” Benbow was now pink with embarrassment. “His appointment was quite in order.”

“I’m sure it was. But who the devil agreed to it?”

The Archivist braced himself visibly. “You did, Sir Frederick,” he said.

“I did—did I?” Sir Frederick scowled reflectively.

Neville Macready, who had drifted away from the group to continue his examination of the carpet’s pattern, gave an irreverent snort.

“So I did, so I did!” Sir Frederick muttered at last. “I remember now: you wanted a Grade Two Deputy and I wouldn’t let you have him. You’re quite right, Mr. Benbow—I apologise.”

“It was a matter of finance, sir, as I recall.”

“Quite so. … Hmm! Then where did we get the man from, Superintendent?”

“From the Army, sir. He’d just taken early retirement from the RASC—warrant officer class two. He was in War Department records, so he had the right qualifications. It was a perfectly proper appointment.”

“Perfectly proper stupidity, you mean!” Sir Frederick shook his head regretfully. “And he had no access to classified material?”

“None at all,” said Benbow emphatically.

“What about the Dead Files? Weren’t they next door to the Reading Room?”

“They’re properly secured, sir. There’s an electronic lock and the key has to be signed for.”

“Of course,” Sir Frederick nodded. “And you were satisfied with Hemingway?”

“He was competent.”

“Competent?” The renewed question probed Benbow’s slight hesitation. “No more than that?”

“There was no scope in his grade for more than that, Sir Frederick.” The probe was rewarded with a suggestion of distaste.

“But you didn’t like him, Mr. Benbow?”

“I can’t say I cared for him. He was—he tried to be friendly, I suppose. He was always talking about what he saw on television—he had a colour set.”

The Archivist made television sound like a physical handicap not spoken of in polite society, the coloured version being a particularly unfortunate manifestation of it.

“I didn’t know him very well, Sir Frederick,” Benbow concluded rather defensively.

“Very good.” Sir Frederick stood up. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Benbow. If this body of ours does turn out to be Hemingway, you are certainly not responsible in any way for what has occurred. But even if it doesn’t we shall get rid of him. And you shall have a Grade Two deputy for the Reading Room, I promise you …”

“Well?”

Richardson waited for Cox to speak first.

“He could have been got at, sir,” said Cox. “It would be worth their while to have someone in this building, even in the Reading Room. He could report on comings and goings at the least. And on the things that interested us. A foot in the door’s better than nothing.”

“Richardson?”

“He overheard David talk to Macready here. That’s what set him off, I’ll bet.”

“Neville—was Hemingway there when you met David?”

Macready stopped pacing, shrugged. “He could have been. We were there—he’s just part of the furniture as far as I’m concerned.”

“Could he have seen the file?”

“What file?”

“The one David was looking at,” said Sir Frederick with well-controlled patience.

Macready frowned. “I didn’t see any file.”

“David was looking at that file,” Sir Frederick pointed to the desk.

“Not when he talked to me,” said Macready.

“It is important, Neville,” Sir Frederick said softly, but with an iceberg tip of firmness showing.

Macready stared at him. “Oh—come on, Fred! I went down there to look at the new AEQ. I was just going to sit down and David came up—we walked around a bit as we talked. I didn’t look under the bloody table for spies—“

As he trailed off in vague irritation Richardson found himself once more searching for emotion in the faces of the other two men, and finding very little. He felt he was learning something useful about man—management, but he wasn’t at all sure yet what it was. But they’d got what they wanted, anyway, even if it was not exactly reassuring: while Macready and David had communed with each other on their own esoteric intellectual plane Hemingway could probably have learnt the file’s contents by heart without disturbing them.

“What’s in it that’s so special, for God’s sake?” said Macready suddenly, lurching towards the desk and scooping up the file. Without another word he split it open with a well-chewed thumbnail and plunged into it, oblivious of his surroundings.

“Superintendent—“ Sir Frederick’s equanimity was undented by this raid on his desk: he simply ignored it. “I think you’d better get after the Hemingway angle.”

“I’ll do that, sir,” said Cox. For the first time there was a hint of eagerness in his voice. Or was it gratitude?—it sounded quite remarkably like gratitude.

“Captain Richardson—“ as the Special Branch man nodded towards him Richardson detected a flicker of sympathy, “—good luck to you.”

It
was
gratitude.

The speed of Cox’s retreat took Richardson by surprise. And then, even before the door had clicked shut, its implications presented themselves to him like the figures on a bill run up by someone else which was about to be passed to him for payment.

Since Macready’s arrival, and even more since Cox’s, he had seemed to be no more than a spectator of a game in which he had already played his part. But Cox had been sent about his business at this point not simply because internal security was his job, but because Sir Frederick did not intend to involve him in its wider aspect. And he, Richardson, had remained—and was still uncomfortably remaining—because that too was part of the design.

Not for the first time he had the sense of being manipulated—of having only partial freewill: not a bus, not a train, but a tram…

He had not been pulled out of Ireland because he was the only man who could make Mrs. Clark talk: Hugh Roskill was also one of Clarkie’s favourites, and Hugh was still convalescing from his last operation and would therefore have been much more easily usable. So it had all along been planned that if the case developed the assignment would be his, and that most obviously because of his special fitness for Italian operations.

But for once the thought of his second homeland aroused no light in his soul, for it was overshadowed by the realisation of what had really happened at Steeple Horley. What had seemed like a daring display of independence had in fact been nothing of the kind: he had not outfaced anyone with his demand to go straight to the top on David Audley’s behalf—he had merely anticipated his own orders.

“You don’t look happy, Peter,” said Sir Frederick.

Well, it still might all be conjecture, because it was no good kidding himself that he was up to calculating all their angles yet. But one thing wasn’t conjecture, and it ruddy well cooled his ardour now: Superintendent Cox had seized his dismissal like a thirty-year prisoner snatching a Royal Pardon, without asking questions or waiting for answers. And it wasn’t just because Cox preferred the safe routine of checking on a dead Hemingway to the mind-bending frustrations of handling live Macreadys and Audleys, but because he knew enough not to want to know more.

“Should I be, then?” Richardson grinned insecurely. It was just like David had once said, the time to worry was when other people looked sorry for you as they said goodbye.

“You don’t fancy a trip to Italy?”

Ten out of ten for Answer Number One.

“To bring David back in chains? Not especially, no.”

“Not in chains… Would you rather go back to Dublin?”

“You must be joking!” Richardson shuddered.

“Then what’s so awful about Italy?”

“Nothing—about Italy.” Richardson hardened his voice. “But there are too many loose ends in England.”

“For example?”

“Hemingway, for a start. If he’s the man old Charlie shot—their inside man here on an outside job—it doesn’t damn well make sense—“

“And neither does
that
.” Macready tossed the file on to the table irritably.

“Why not, Neville?”

“Because the idea of Hotzendorff bringing a plum out of Russia verges on the ridiculous, that’s why.”

“He didn’t bring it out. He sent it. And he didn’t send it to us, so it seems.” Sir Frederick paused. “And it rather looks as though he died for it.”

“He died of a heart attack—“ Macready frowned suddenly. “You know what’s in the file, then?”

“I read it when the news of his death finally reached us. And then there was the—ah—question of the widow’s pension to be settled.”

There was a half-second of awkwardness, lost on Macready, whose pension and life expectancy were matters of black and white actuarial certainty, but not lost on Richardson.

“You see, Peter—“ Sir Frederick ignored Macready, “—Hotzendorff worked for us for fifteen years as a courier in Russia.”

“A sort of postman,” amended Macready.

“But useful enough. He travelled for an East German farm machinery company—he was our main source for the Virgin Lands scheme for example.”

“In North Kazakhstan, which happens to be about 3,000 miles from the North Sea,” said Macready, “and has no oil.”

“He covered a great deal of territory elsewhere. And he was always very careful—and they trusted him.”

“So did we.”

“With very much better reason. You don’t have to play the devil’s advocate, Neville.”

“I’m not trying to. It’s simply that he wasn’t the sort of man to pick up this sort of information. He was just a delivery agent for second-class mail.”

“He put in his own reports too.”

“Most of which he could have copied from the magazines and papers he bought in the streets. For the sort of thing we’ve been talking about he just didn’t have the background—and he certainly didn’t have the contacts, Fred.”

Sir Frederick sighed, then shook his head. “You can say what you like, Neville. But at the end of the day the only clue we’ve got points to him. And—“ he tapped the file, “there’s circumstantial evidence in here that backs it up, too.”

Richardson grasped thankfully at last at the answer to the question which had been nagging him increasingly: “What clue?”

Sir Frederick half smiled. “The one you brought to us, Peter—the one Narva gave to David’s friend, and he gave to David, and Professor Freisler handed on to you: the Little Bird from East Berlin.”

“The little dickey bird?”

“He started as Dickey Bird, curiously enough, short for Richard von Hotzendorff. He was rechristened Little Bird in ‘61. Born
in
Konigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad, in 1914. David would have recognised him straight away, naturally—“

“David’s signature is on the authorisation transferring the file from active to dead,” said Macready. “His and Latimer’s. July 1970—that would be the yearly clear-out.”

“So he’d have remembered the circumstantial evidence too, then,” Sir Frederick nodded.

Richardson looked at him expectantly.

“Nothing to do with oil, I’m afraid, Peter—Neville’s right there. There isn’t a smell of it.”

“What is there a smell of?”

“The warm South—Italy. Three smells of it, too: Hotzendorff was there first with the German army in ‘42 and ‘43. The second time was twenty-five years later.”

“Twenty-five?” The addition rolled in Richardson’s brain like a jackpot number. “1968.”

“Early in that year. He was dead before the end of it.”

“And Narva was buying into the North Sea.”

“Exactly.”

“The Italian trip isn’t in the file.” Macready’s tone was aggrieved.

“No. We didn’t know it until after he was dead.”

“And there was a third time.” Now there was nothing casual about Macready’s question, his voice was sharp.

“Not for Hotzendorff, there wasn’t. Not long after he died his wife —his widow—got out of East Germany with her three children. She came to us to enquire about his pension. Or at least his gratuity—“

“She got out? You mean we didn’t get her out?” Macready cut in quickly.

“We didn’t—she did.”

“On her own, with three children? She must be a woman of considerable initiative. The East Germans don’t like losing children—did she say how she’d done it?”