October Men (6 page)

He paused, chewing at his pipe, but Richardson waited: there had to be more to it than this.

Stocker shrugged. “Actually we’re pretty sure it was pure self-defence. The fellow on the landing shot at Clark—cut his ear with the bullet. There’s a bullet hole in the newel post, which would have been just by his head. And of course we found the chap’s gun at the bottom of the stairs near Clark. It must have fallen there, because he hadn’t touched it. American Army Colt, standard issue—one round fired.

Richardson frowned. That figured well enough: Charlie had reacted instinctively, though faster obviously than anyone who knew him would have expected. But that wasn’t of any real interest. What mattered was that David’s home had been raided by someone quite prepared to shoot it out with anyone who disturbed him, and that ruled out both the pro burglars and the juvenile scum. Steeple Horley was still light years away from New York in that, as in other things.

Also, it wasn’t the first time that David had had uninvited visitors, he remembered suddenly: in fact that MVD chappie—Guriev?—had been given the bum’s rush from Britain for that, among several other incivilities.

And that, in turn, might account for Stocker’s speedy arrival, for the Old House must by now be in the special Red Book the police had of people and places whose well-being was of interest and importance to security. A gunfight and a dead man in a Red Book house would set all the wires humming to Whitehall.

“Do we have any idea what he was after? Had David got something juicy locked up in that safe of his?”

“Dr. Audley had no classified material at home,” Latimer murmured in a plummy, self-satisfied voice. “He wasn’t working on a classified sector.”

Richardson flicked a contemptuous look at Latimer. “I seem to remember David has a way of catching sharks other people let through the safety nets,” he said coolly. “What does David have to say about it, anyway?”

There was a second’s silence—a silence prolonged just one cold fraction longer than natural, so that it sank down through every layer of Richardson’s consciousness until it came to rest in the pit of his stomach.

Too many policemen. Too many policemen and not a word in the morning paper he had read in the plane, or on the radio news. And now Stacker looking solemn and Oliver St. John Latimer looking smug enough to make a chap throw up his Aer Lingus breakfast on to the nearest Persian rug. And neither of them looking at each other— both of them looking at him…

“Christ—bloody no!” Richardson expelled the words as though they were poison. “I don’t believe it. Anyone else—but not David.”

And yet it sounded feeble in his own ears: too much like an appeal, too little like an affirmation—too much like those other first moments of disbelief.

Not Guy—not Guy
and
Donald!

Surely not Kim, of all people! George? You don’t mean George Blake? But Philip is the last man—David?

He needed time to think.

“Probably not,” agreed Stacker. “On the whole I think I would agree with you. But we have to be sure—and at the moment we simply don’t know.”

“Just what do we know, exactly?” Stacker nodded towards Latimer.

“Dr. Audley has been behaving—“ Latimer made a show of pausing judicially, “—eccentrically of late.”

“Hell’s teeth—he always behaves like that. I’ve never known him act any other way.”

“Eccentric isn’t quite
le mot juste
,” said Latimer hurriedly. “I didn’t wish to sound offensive—I still don’t wish to—but to be quite frank he seemed to me to have delusions of infallibility. And when one questioned his conclusions he’s been extremely disagreeable, to say the very least.”

“Oh, come on!” Richardson cut in derisively. It was the sound of those clichés that suddenly gave him strength: it was precisely that habit of Latimer’s of denying that he intended to be offensive just before he delivered his worst insults, and of proclaiming his frankness when he was about to be less than frank, that drove David Audley farthest up the wall.

“There’s more to it than that, naturally.”

“There’d bloody better be, hadn’t there?”

“There is,” said Stacker bleakly.

Richardson felt his new-found confidence shrivel up as quickly as it had inflated, like a child’s balloon. If Latimer was quite capable of mounting a palace revolution against a rival, the brigadier was too cautious a man either to join such a plot or to be easily taken in by one.

“It could be that David has simply been very foolish, but the fact is that he’s gone to Rome with his family, bag and baggage, without any sort of clearance from the department whatsoever. In fact he didn’t tell a soul where he was going—except his cleaning woman, Mrs. Clark. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have the faintest idea where he was.”

He paused to let the enormity of the security breach sink in. “He slunk off on the cheap night flight. And if we didn’t have this dead man on our hands we’d never have checked up on him either, because he’s supposed to be on ten days’ leave that was due to him.”

Foolish! By damn, it was that right enough, thought Richardson bitterly. And more than that: it was almost the classic pattern for a defection, neither too elaborate nor too simple, but just enough to delay precipitate action under normal circumstances.

Only a dead man had blown it sky high—it hadn’t even required any malice of Latimer’s to stir things after that. No bloody wonder they were all in a muck sweat.

But he still needed time to think—time, and a lot more information.

“Mrs. Clark,” he exclaimed suddenly. Almost the classic pattern, but not quite: Mrs. Clark was the odd thread in the design. She was a lot more than David’s cleaning woman, he knew that: she had been an integral part of the landscape of the Old House for over half a century. As a young girl she had mothered the lonely boy after his real mother’s death, had been his confidant in the stepmother era and had naturally graduated to the post of housekeeper when he had come into his kingdom. Indeed, during one long drunken evening on that last assignment in the north David had as good as hinted that it had only been with her approval that he had married Faith. So it was not in the least surprising that she alone knew where he had gone. But if he hadn’t intended to come back he would have sworn her to secrecy, and she would have kept the secret over a regiment of bodies.

“What about her?” Stocker watched him narrowly.

“What does she say?”

Stocker grimaced. “Nothing—that’s the trouble.”

“Nothing? But she told you David’s Rome address?”

“She told us that, yes. And she told us that someone shot at her husband. But beyond that she won’t say a word. She won’t even admit that her husband shot back, even though they found him with the shotgun still in his hands.”

“What does Charlie say?”

Stocker stared at him, frowning. “He won’t say anything either. Apparently she told him to keep quiet, and that’s just what he’s done. The police can’t get a word out of either of them.”

He could well believe the news of Charlie’s silence, because Charlie was taciturn by nature as well as obedient to his wife by long-established custom. But Mrs. Clark’s closed mouth was another matter, and a much more suspicious one too. In an unnaturally garrulous moment her husband had once observed that she talked enough for two, and it was the plain truth: she had a tongue like a teenager’s transistor.

“I’d like to have a go at her then,” said Richardson. “She doesn’t know you, but she does know me and I think I’d stand a better chance with her than most anyone else.”

“I’m relieved to hear that you think so,” said Stocker, with the ghost of a calculating smile. “Because that, Peter, is one of the chief reasons why you are here.”

There was a large man in thornproof tweeds talking to another man in a rain-darkened trenchcoat outside the door to the dining room. At second glance Trenchcoat was maybe an inch taller than Tweeds, but Tweeds carried a weight of confidence and authority which gave him extra inches, the boss-man’s eternal unfair advantage.

When they turned towards Stocker, however, their faces bore exactly the same guarded expression in which deference and hostility exactly cancelled each other out. Richardson had seen that look before and understood it only too well. He even felt a twinge of sympathy: on its own this was a nasty little affair, involving firearms— which the British police violently disliked—and a shooting match between civilians—which mortally offended them. But at least it was clear enough what had happened, or so it must have seemed at first glance.

But now they faced the added and appallingly tricky dimension of national security, the cloak under which crimes were not only committed but sometimes allowed to go unpunished. So now these guardians of the peace could feel the solid ground of the law shifting under their feet; at the best they might be required to turn a blind eye, which they hated doing, and at the worst they might be forced to connive at felony—that was what they feared most now.

“Ah—Superintendent!” The clipped tone of Stacker’s voice left nobody in doubt as to who was the senior officer present. “This is the —ah—officer from the Ministry I briefed you about—Captain Richardson.”

The Superintendent appraised Richardson briefly, then nodded.

“You think you can make Mrs. Clark tell her husband to talk to us, Captain?”

Richardson could not help grinning. The difference between them was that the police only wanted old Charlie to admit he’d pulled the trigger, whereas Stocker wanted to know how Audley had taken it into his head to disappear. But obviously both of them were surprised and galled to come up against a pair of old countryfolk who were not overawed by the combined sight of the police and the Ministry of Defence.

David would have enjoyed that!

He shrugged. “It’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Just how much have you got so far?”

“Not much.” The Superintendent admitted, turning towards his subordinate. “You tell him, John.”

“Not much indeed.” Trenchcoat grinned back wryly at Richardson, as one journeyman to another. “And most of it comes from the constable here, Yates.”

He paused. “Mrs. Clark woke him up about half-past one this morning. Said someone had broken in here, they’d seen a torch flashing, and Charlie had gone up—that’s Mr. Clark—to stop ‘em getting away. Yates came on straight up here with Mrs. Clark—she wouldn’t stay behind. They found Clark sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and this other fella up on the landing. Charlie had stopped
him
right enough.”

“But Charlie said something?”

“Aye. Not that it makes much sense. He said—at least Yates thinks he said—‘Bloody Germans—shot at me.’ And then his wife said ‘Hold your tongue, Charlie.’ And not a word we’ve had out of him since.”

“Germans?”

“That’s what Yates thought he said, but the old man was in quite a state so he may have misheard.”

“On the contrary,” Richardson shook his head. “I’d guess that was exactly what Charlie said.”

“Indeed?” Trenchcoat looked interested. “He was in the war then?”

“He was in the army for about a year—he was invalided out after Dunkirk. From what David’s told me I think he had a bad time during the retreat, but it wasn’t a subject you could get him to talk about— not that you could ever get him to talk about anything really. Only he certainly had it in for the Germans… And is that all you got out of them?”

“The woman gave us Dr. Audley’s address without us asking for it —she had it written on a piece of paper. She just said she wanted to talk to this solicitor of hers and she wouldn’t talk to us.”

A look of irritation passed across the Superintendent’s face. Glancing sidelong at Stacker, Richardson was rewarded with a similar expression. So that was the size of it: the shrewd old body had not just simply closed up on them—she had claimed her rights with the speed of an old lag! Small wonder the big shots were vexed as well as suspicious.

It occurred to him suddenly that some of that annoyance had been directed at Trenchcoat as well. That Stocker had not been wholly open with him was no surprise, of course; the detail about the solicitor merely confirmed what could be taken for granted. But obviously no one had thought to warn Trenchcoat. So—

“I was going to tell you about that, Peter,” Stocker said. “You can see what it means.”

“Yes, I can see how important it is to stop her blabbing to a solicitor,” Richardson replied helpfully. He turned back quickly to Trenchcoat before anyone could change the action. “What about the rest of it?”

“You mean the other man?”

“The other man—“ Richardson held his gaze to the exclusion of anyone else’s warning expression. “—Yes. The other man.”

Trenchcoat shrugged. “Apart from the imprint of his shoes in the flowerbed at the back where he jumped out of the window, we haven’t got a thing on him. He must have beat it fast after Clark shot his mate, but he didn’t leave his calling card anywhere.”

So there’d been two of them, and the news—whatever the news was —was out. Two of them, and they hadn’t bothered to tell him: his role was simply to soften up Mrs. Clark and then return to the joys of Dublin.

“Of course, we haven’t asked round the village yet—“ Trenchcoat stopped abruptly, as though someone had pressed his switch.

“I think—“ Stocker filled the break smoothly “—we’d better find out first whether you can open up Mrs. Clark before we tie up the loose ends for you, Peter.”

“Right.” Richardson spread an innocent glance around him; Stocker was playing it deadpan still, although Trenchcoat could not quite conceal his confusion any more than the Superintendent bothered to hide a suggestion of contempt at this turn of events. It was Oliver St. John Latimer’s expression of suspicion which decided him on his course of action: the man was a slob, but not a foolish slob to be taken in by false innocence. The moment he got Stocker alone he would make one thing clear: that Richardson was a disciple of Audley’s, and therefore not to be trusted. And Stocker would believe him—now.

So there was nothing more to be gained by being a good little boy!

“Right,” he repeated. “So what sort of deal do I make with her?”