Other Paths to Glory (20 page)

‘Well, two reasons. F-first - ‘

Mitchell broke off for a moment in order to marshall his thoughts, warned by the return of that tell-tale nervous stutter. Whatever the man Roskill said, Audley wasn’t likely to carry a dumb passenger with him as the pace grew hotter. If his instinct about the nature of these questions was right then his continued presence in France might depend on his performance in the next few minutes.

‘It was a shell right enough. The smoke was right and the smell was - was how I’ve heard it described.’

Steady now.

‘It could be an accident, people do get blown up on the Somme now and then. In fact everyone loves to tell stories about the danger - I was telling Nikki - Mademoiselle MacMahon - just before this one went up. But…’

‘Yes?’

‘It could have been an accident - there wasn’t enough left of the poor devil to prove otherwise. But that isn’t the point.’

‘Which is - ?’

‘Wherever we go there are accidents. If someone hadn’t spotted the fire in time Charles Emerson would have been an accident - and George Davis would have been just another hit-and-run case.’

‘And Paul Mitchell would have been just another suicide?’ Audley had no scruples about mentioning the unmentionable. ‘If you’re right, then no one could accuse them of being unimaginative. But you’ve still only got a working hypothesis in this case.’

‘That’s all we’ve ever had - a hypothesis that Charles Emerson saw something out here. But maybe he didn’t see anything - maybe someone showed him something, or told him something. Someone who’s just had an accident, maybe.’

‘While on the way to see the next Englishman who started sniffing around Bouillet Wood?’ Audley stared at him over his glasses. ‘And meanwhile the police are happy with their accident?’

‘That was just for my benefit, I’ll swear. They wanted me out of their hair, that’s what - they don’t like strangers on Hameau Ridge, alive or dead. That’s the point.’

‘The police?’

‘The gate-keeper wouldn’t tell me who lived there - five minutes later the police were checking our papers. They spoke the same language - I’m damn sure the gate-keeper was a policeman … and that fence has “official” stamped all over it, I knew it when I saw it, but for some reason it didn’t register …’

‘Go on.’

‘The motor-cycle police weren’t following us, they were directed to us, I’m damn sure of that too. And they didn’t just clear off after they’d checked us, because they reached the ravine only a second or two after I did - and the place was crawling with police within ten minutes, not only uniformed ones but chaps in plainclothes. They were there too quickly, far too many of them. Police-dogs too, and they were setting up a portable generator as we left.’

Audley nodded slowly.

‘All for - an accident.’

‘That’s exactly it! The inspector who questioned me went out of his way to tell me it was an accident - told me how people were always tampering with old shells as though it happens all the time - ‘

‘Which it doesn’t?’

‘Well, hardly. Children maybe, but the locals know the score by now - you’ve got to be crazy to try getting a brass nose-cone off, for a few pounds it’s not worth the risk. But it all adds up to the same thing: whatever’s happening in Bouillet Wood, it’s official not private.’

Audley was looking at him with that irritating abstracted expression again, not so much looking at him as through him. Only now that he could well understand the reason for the abstraction, and knew himself to be the cause of it, it seemed much less irritating - it was pleasing even.

‘And the French aren’t letting anyone overfly the ridge,’ he added, popping the cherry on top of the cake. ‘Roskill said - ‘

‘I’ve already heard what Roskill has to say,’ Audley interrupted him smoothly, still gazing through him but otherwise apparently unruffled. The hand he had raised to check Mitchell pointed vaguely towards the table nearby: ‘Got something for you on there - a special little present.’

Apart from the brandy bottle and glasses the only thing on the table was a book, an oldish-looking red volume with a sun-faded spine.

‘The book,’ Audley murmured as Mitchell hesitated. ‘Have a look at the pictures, they’re rather good.’

A special little present? Mitchell picked it up gingerly, frowning:
With the Tanks at
Cambrai: The War Diary of Sergeant Frank Briggs
…

His eye was caught by the inscription on the fly-leaf:
Paul Lefevre, 16 August 1066 with
love from Mother
…
someone had taken a lot of trouble with the special little present - even the ink had been skilfully faded.

Look at the pictures.

They were in a group in the middle, a very typical selection for this type of war memoir, which had begun to appear about a decade after the war’s end, as time had started to blur the horror: first the customary Edwardian family group. Father Briggs moustachioed and watch-chained, staring sternly out of the picture; Mother in her leg-of-mutton sleeves, the obligatory baby on her lap, two little girls in pinafore dresses and black stockings, and young Frank himself, his sturdy body buttoned up in a best suit already one size too small for him … a portrait not only of a family, but of old Imperial Britain, safe and solid behind the largest navy in the world and the empire on which the sun never set, blissfully unaware of barbed wire and mustard gas and Flanders mud.

Over the page history had trapped Frank Briggs, first in a group of identical young men posed against a patriotic background of allied flags, the
Prince Albert Street
volunteers of1014,
and then proud and innocent in his new ill-fitting khaki uniform. Next page, the reality:
Cafe Beige, near Dicksbusch -
only the cafe was a crumpled nissen hut in a hideous wilderness …
Shrapnel Comer -
and judging by the eagerness of the passing field battery, plus the wreckage beside the road, the Germans had the range to the last inch …

Now the tank pictures: a Mark I in Chimpanzee Valley, a male tank with its long naval six-pounders … tanks single and tanks massed; tanks whole, surrounded by curious infantrymen, and tanks bogged and shattered, sinking like dead dinosaurs in ancient swamps.

More group pictures. Somewhere here there would be a gaunter, wiser Frank Briggs –

That was odd -

In fact it was downright impossible.

Mitchell bent over the picture, checked the caption -
In billets before the battle -
checked the faces again and the names below them.

Corporal J. Manson and Sergeant ‘Jocko’ Ogilvie.

‘Well?’

Audley was very much with him again, watching his bewilderment with unconcealed interest.

Mitchell lifted the book.

‘I don’t understand it.’

‘Don’t understand what?’

‘This picture. There are two men here …’ he trailed off, unwilling to hear himself finish the sentence.

‘Two men - what?’

Mitchell squinted at the photograph once more, stripping the crumpled uniforms and sandbagged background away. For once his memory had to be playing him false.

‘I could swear I’ve seen two of these men.’

‘When?’

That was the sticking point. Faces must logically recur with the same mathematical certainty which rolled golf balls into holes in one stroke. But this coincidence was altogether too great.

He nerved himself to the word.

‘Today.’

‘Which two?’

Mitchell stared at Audley questioningly. What was almost as surprising as this impossible identification was that the big man was not the least surprised by the impossible.

‘Which two?’ Audley repeated. ‘Show me.’

Mitchell surrendered the book, speechlessly.

‘
In billets before the battle?

‘Yes.’ Mitchell nodded. T’op left, standing - he was on the gate at Bouillet Wood.’

‘Corporal J. Manson?’ read Audley equably. ‘And the other one?’

Mitchell swallowed.

‘Bottom row, second from the right. Sergeant Ogilvie.’

‘Sergeant Jocko Ogilvie?’ The corner of Audley’s mouth lifted. ‘And where did you see Sergeant Jocko Ogilvie?’

‘Obviously I didn’t see him. But I saw his double.’

‘Where?’

‘In Rattlesnake Ravine this evening. When the inspector questioned me he – his double - came over and listened. He didn’t say anything, he just listened. I thought he was some sort of official, a sort of Home Office observer type.’

‘I see …’ Audley nodded. ‘You’ve got a remarkable memory for faces.’

‘I thought I had.’

‘But you have. A nearly photographic memory to spot those two, to pick them out like that. It’s a very useful gift.’

The picture and Audley were equally incomprehensible, so there was no point in asking any fatuous questions: if they were still alive. Corporal Manson and Sergeant Ogilvie were white-haired eighty-year-olds, and the possibility that they had facially identical grandsons serving in the French security forces was too remote to be worth considering. He could only wait for enlightenment.

Audley grinned.

‘I told you it was a special present. I had our photographic section put it together for you - they took out the original pictures and reprocessed them with some trick photography of their own. Anyone who goes through your belongings wouldn’t give it a second glance, and I reckoned you might like to carry it round with you. I didn’t think it’d pay off so quickly though.’

Mitchell looked down at the picture again. It showed, some smiling, some serious, nine very ordinary British soldiers, vintage 1917. The faces were a little drawn and wary, older and more mature than the Prince Albeit Street volunteers of the earlier page, but that was only to be expected. Veterans of two years’ trench warfare never looked young, no matter what age they were.

‘You are looking at an artificially assembled gallery of nine known members of the Service de Documentation Presidentielle - the nine men we know, that is,’ said Audley. ‘If you care to turn over you’ll find another equally worthy group.’

Mitchell turned the page, to find a chorus line in old time music hall dress, their costumes clearly makeshift.

‘
The Divisional Christmas Party - 1917?
’

‘That’s the one - someone in photographic has a warped sense of humour. Have you seen any of them?’

Mitchell ran his eye along the line, several of whom were gazing out of the picture at slightly awkward angles.

‘No.’

‘I’m relieved to hear it. Those are the eight faces in our files who most resemble the man who called on General Leigh-Woodhouse - minus the long hair and the phony spectacles. Men who in our opinion would undertake contract killing if the price was right.’

Audley paused.

‘They matter less, but it could be one of them put you in the river, my lad.’

Mitchell examined the fancy-dressed line again, though this time with a sudden chill between his shoulders as though the memory of the freezing water still was able to produce a physical reaction. The original faces on this picture had also belonged to killers; tank crewmen who had crushed their way through the Hindenburg Line. But they had killed for King and Country and a shilling a day; these men, working on their own account, would be much more expensive. He was disappointed to see how very ordinary they were. Except that ordinariness must be an essential attribute of their calling, another simple application of the Darwinian law of natural selection.

He shook his head.

‘No, I’ve never seen any of them.’

‘No matter.’ Audley gave a small shrug. ‘Just keep the book with you and your eyes open. If you spot anyone you think you’ve seen, let me know double-quick.’

Mitchell’s heart gave an extra thump: whatever the test had been, he had passed it - his first solo flight had not been a failure. He hadn’t disgraced himself.

‘How will I keep in touch with you?’

‘That won’t be any problem. We can work together again now.’ Audley smiled. ‘The wraps are off now.’

‘The wraps - ?’ Mitchell felt a sense of dismay. ‘You mean they know about us?’

‘Oh, sure. They know about us - and they want us to know - the SDP, that is. You told me so yourself just now. They want us to make contact.’

‘I told you so?’

‘Indirectly. When Sergeant Ogilvie carefully showed you his face he was serving notice to me that he wanted us to come out of the bushes. He expected you to report straight back to me, as you have - he was relying on you. That’s why they didn’t bother to follow you from the hotel. No point in frightening the messenger.’

The card-house of Mitchell’s confidence was in ruins, his pride flattened. The French had known: all the while he had been congratulating himself on his cleverness, they had known. But how - ?

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know how Sergeant Ogilvie’s mind works - and he knows how mine works,’ said Audley disarmingly.

‘Sergeant Ogilvie? Who - ?’

But he knew even before Audley replied.

‘Alias Edouard Ollivier. I wasn’t absolutely sure he was in charge of this operation, of course - which is why I let things move at their own pace. But he was obviously expecting me -‘ Audley stopped suddenly, as though he had noticed Mitchell’s dismay at last. ‘Don’t look so sad, Paul. You’ve done splendidly - not put a foot wrong. No one could have done better.’

The force of Roskill’s warning was more evident now: he had underestimated the French and Audley alike. But, far more serious, he had started to overestimate himself.

Yet Audley was regarding him sympathetically.

‘I mean that, Paul. And in case you think I don’t I’ll prove it to you here and now. If you want a job with us when this is over, then you’ve got it. You can finish your book and then come to us, and you can have sabbaticals for other books. Don’t answer me now, just think about it.’

Mitchell was taken flat aback, but before he could grapple with the offer - a job with us? With who? With what? - Audley drew himself up decisively.

‘But now - we make contact with Ollivier.’

Mitchell pushed the job offer to the back of his mind with an effort.