War Game (11 page)

“Bramshill?”

“Police College. One of the top three of his year.”

“But then you put him back into uniform?”

“That’s the rule. Uniform sergeant for one year. Then automatic promotion to inspector—and I’ll have him as one of mine if it’s the last thing I do. He’s the sort we need, a born thief-taker if ever I saw one … bright, but not flashy. That’s the way they made ‘em at Fenton Grammar when old Jukes was headmaster. So you be careful of him … sir.” The hard look was granite now. “I want him back when you’ve finished with him, too.”

“I wasn’t thinking of kidnapping him, Superintendent.”

“No?” Granite veined with calculation. “Just so he doesn’t acquire a taste for Special Branch work, that’s all.”

“Recruiting for the Special Branch isn’t one of my duties, that I promise you.”

Audley returned the look. “But you think this is shaping into a Special Branch case?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t, no.” Not much, by God. That was further confirmation of the as yet unasked question. But they’d come back to that when the time was right. “So … bright, but not flashy. A good copper. A real thief-taker.”

“Aye.” Weston was no slouch himself: he was tensed up for the next question already.

“And yet he’s a member of this … this Double R Society.”

One controlled nod. “That’s correct, sir.”

“And the Roundhead Wing of it, presumably, yes?” That was mere deduction: the one thing the Brigadier had said about Digby was that he’d been down by the stream throughout the battle, a mere stone’s throw from the scene of the killing.

Another nod. So Sergeant Digby was a Roundhead.

“Who are perhaps a little weird?”

“Some of them are. And some of the Royalists too,” Weston admitted. “But not Sergeant Digby.”

“It doesn’t surprise you that he’s a member?”

“There are plenty of perfectly respectable citizens on both sides.” Weston was doing his best to sound matter-of-fact rather than defensive. “Amateur historians and teachers and such like—a few retired army officers too. … And the prospective Labour candidate for this area is a Roundhead officer, actually.”

Audley shook his head, smiling. “You haven’t answered my question—actually.”

Weston shrugged. “We encourage our men to have their own hobbies. Sergeant Digby attended one of these mock-battles when he was a uniformed constable.”

“On duty, you mean?”

“That’s right. We always have three or four men at these things, for crowd control and such like—they can draw as big a crowd as a second division football match, these mock-battles. We’ve had up to ten thousand people for a big one. So the Society asks us for men, and pays for them … and we throw in half a dozen special constables for free.”

“I see. And he attended one and then became interested?” Audley nodded. One of those eleven ‘O’ levels had to be History, and maybe one of the ‘A’ levels too. And for a bet, the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still more popular among schoolmasters than that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries now, just as it had been in his own schooldays. So that figured well enough.

But it damn well wasn’t the only thing that figured—and that figured even better, Audley thought triumphantly as he stared at Weston.

We encourage our men to have their hobbies.

I’ll bet we do!

“Have you ever been to one of these battles, Superintendent?” Try as he would, he couldn’t make the question sound innocent.

“I have, yes.” And try as he would, Weston had the same trouble with his reply. “Have you, sir?”

“No. Not my … scene, as they say.” And not Superintendent Weston’s scene either, for a hundred-to-one bet. “But I’m learning fast—about the police as well as the Civil War.”

For a moment they stared at each other. Then, as abruptly as it had disappeared a few minutes before, the smile came back to Weston’s mouth. But this time the humour spread, crinkling up the whole face.

Finally Weston grinned broadly. “All right, Dr. Audley—I give you best there. He did get interested, I told you no lie. It was partly because he is interested in history, too.”

“But you were interested too, eh?”

Weston beamed. “It’s a pleasure to do business with you, Dr. Audley.”

“Even your own business?”

“Better you than some fool who thinks he knows all the answers.”

“Quite so. Whereas I don’t even know all the questions yet. … So he came to you and asked permission to join?”

“Not to me. This was while he was still in uniform as a constable.”

“Of course. I was forgetting. He went to his uniform superintendent.” Audley nodded.

“That’s right. But he was due for a CID transfer in a few months’ time, and his super knew I had my eye on the Double R people.”

“Uh-huh. … So you gave him your blessing—you even encouraged him.” The pleasure, thought Audley, was mutual: this must be a good force, in which the men in charge of the different branches were on the same side, unlike some of those in his own service.

“One volunteer’s worth a dozen pressed men. And young Digby was made to measure for what I wanted.”

“Which was?”

Weston thought for a moment, staring up sightlessly towards the ridge. The hottest part of the afternoon was almost spent, but with no breath of wind the skyline still shimmered with heat. There wasn’t a sign of life or movement anywhere. In an hour or two, with the first cool of evening, it would be different; but now the landscape seemed exhausted, almost stupefied.

It was hard to imagine that the hillside, this same hillside, had once boiled with murderous activity—that Black Thomas’s cavalry had swept down it, desperate with thirst.

Audley licked his lips. On second thoughts that thirst wasn’t so unimaginable. And he’d already decided that one place was as good as another when it came to killing, hadn’t he?

Weston turned back to him. “How much d’you know about these Double R people?”

“Not a lot yet.” Audley returned the look candidly. “But I think at the moment I’d rather like to avoid jumping to conclusions. Which is pretty much the answer to my question, I suspect: you didn’t just want an inside man—a spy. Would that be about the size of things?”

“That’s very good. Dr. Audley. You’re absolutely right. Crime’s one thing and prejudice is another, and the copper who mixes them up only makes trouble for himself. My business is crime.”

“You had a prejudice against them?”

“Not to start with. It was more like curiosity.

“Professional curiosity?”

“Indirectly, I read about one of these battles they staged, when there were a dozen people carted off to hospital. And it occurred to me if that had been a football match I’d have thought ‘Aye aye—the local yobbos are getting out of hand’. So I went to have a look at one of their shows for myself, unofficially.”

“And—?”

“Well, they differ, of course. The Sealed Knot—pretty respectable … the King’s Army—lots of beer and good fellowship. Both keen on their history. Discipline not bad really. Safety regulations … well, improving, let’s say.”

“Safety regulations? So there’s an element of danger—but if they cart people off to hospital obviously there is. Silly question.”

“Not so silly. Before I read that newspaper report I’d assumed their battles were glorified pageants—cream puffs at five yards sort of thing. And after I’d seen one … well, I must say I was surprised by what I saw.

“I suppose the size of the battle plays a part in it. Sometimes there are only three or four dozen putting on a parade and a bit of old-fashioned drill at a fete—‘Shoulder Your Pikes’ and ‘Advance Your Pikes’, that sort of thing. But the first big fight I saw the Double R people stage, down in the west of the county it was … there were six or seven hundred of them, and it wasn’t cream-puffs at five yards at all—it was pretty brutal. They really went at each other.”

“Undisciplined, you mean?”

“No, they were disciplined all right. Just like the others. They keep together in their regiments, as they call them. And they charge each other in their regiments too, I can tell you.”

“Like a rugger scrum?” Audley tried without success to envisage a rugger scrum in seventeenth-century battledress, with three hundred a side. “But they’re carrying pikes, aren’t they … ?”

“And swords. And there are musketeers.” Weston nodded.

“They charge each other with pikes … Christ! I can see that would be dangerous. It’s a wonder there aren’t more hurt!”

“Yes … but at the last moment they port their pikes—hold them up diagonally across their bodies—and then smack into each other.”

Weston slapped his open hands together graphically. “And then they push like buggery until one side gives up. Or their officers break it off.” Weston stopped suddenly. “But you say you don’t want to hear this sort of detail yet?”

“Oh, I don’t mind the technicalities.” Audley glanced at Weston, unwilling to probe too obviously. What he wanted must be given freely or not at all, that was the essence of it. “But what I still don’t quite understand is why all this interested you… . That is, after you’d seen it… . I mean, so they were playing soldiers— maybe a little roughly. But that’s all it amounts to: playing soldiers. The Americans have been playing their Civil War for years. And now they’re busy playing the War of Independence. If you don’t force people to wear uniforms they’ll put them on of their own accord. At least, some people will. And so long as it’s historical —so long as it isn’t para-military… . You’re not suggesting the Double R Society is para-military in seventeenth-century drag, are you?”

Weston stared at him in silence for a moment. “No, not exactly para-military.”

“What then?”

Again Weston said nothing for a few seconds. Then he shook his head doubtfully. “If I tell you I’ll be helping you to jump to conclusions, that’s for sure.”

Audley shook his head. “I’m rather afraid I’ve already been helped to this one, so the damage is already done. But I’d be interested to find out whether it’s the same one—and I’ll make allowances for your prejudices, Superintendent.” He smiled the sting out of the words. “So you went on the look-out for—ah—yobbos having a licensed punch-up. And you found … something more interesting, maybe?”

Weston pursed his lips. “To be honest, Dr. Audley, I’m not at all sure what I found—not yet, anyway.” He paused, as though unwilling to commit himself. “Just let’s say as a policeman I’m prejudiced against … politics.”

So there it was, thought Audley: the confirmation of what Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon had encountered, passed on with all the caution and non-partisanship of the man in the middle, the good copper. There was an irony there which neither of the extremes could stomach, and against which they therefore blinkered themselves: to the far left Weston was a Fascist pig marked for the lamp-post, and to the far right a potential tool to be flattered and used; whereas in reality Weston’s breed regarded both sides with equal contempt as it protected each from the excesses of the other.

“Just so,” he agreed sympathetically. “Not para-military so much as parapolitical. And what was it brought you to that conclusion?”

“They sang the wrong tune.”

“I beg your pardon?” Audley frowned. “They sang—?”

“The wrong tune, aye.” Weston gave him a grim little smile. “Funny thing was, I almost missed it. Because, you see, I didn’t really go on the look-out for yobbos. Or shall we say—I didn’t expect to see any of my yobbos, not at that sort of gathering. Not quite their style, if you see what I mean.”

True. Yobbos might, or might not, know a great deal about football, but it was unlikely that any of them would be able to satisfy the Double R Society’s membership committees.

“Of course. I was forgetting—it was the casualties you were interested in. You wanted to see how they’d got themselves organised.”

“That’s right. And after I’d seen them fight their battle I was in two minds about packing it in and going home. I’d seen what I came to see. But then I thought …” he shrugged “… I was there, so I might as well see the whole thing out. See how they behaved off the battlefield when they’d had a few beers, talk to them and see what made them tick, and so on.”

Thoroughness. The mark of the good copper.

“So I waited.” Weston continued simply. “And as they marched off the field I heard them singing. One lot of Cavaliers were singing a dirty song, and some of the Roundheads were singing hymns. But then there was this regiment at the rear, pikemen, all in red coats and steel helmets. Charlie Ratcliffe’s regiment, it was.”

“Yes?”

“They were singing
The Red Flag
, Dr. Audley.”

THE POLICE HOUSE
at Standingham was a solid, red-brick dwelling, with a well-regimented garden which looked as though it was inspected twice a week by a superior officer who regarded weeds as law-breakers.

After dropping Digby outside it, Audley took the car forward a couple of hundred yards to the forecourt of the Steyning Arms, where it mingled unobtrusively with those of the pub’s early evening drinkers.

He would dearly have liked a pint now himself, but that would have to wait. It was bad enough to allow the mere indulgence of his curiosity to rule his judgement, though if pressed he could argue that now, if ever, was the time to look the place over, before Ratcliffe could possibly be aware of his presence; but whatever the argument, it would be pointless to expose his presence to the public gaze without good cause.

And there was the rub, though: there was really no point in coming to Standingham now, if ever, and he was only doing it because Nayler’s smug references to his “little television programme” had galled him—the idea of Stephen Nayler squatting on any secret that interested David Audley was like an itch on the sole of his foot; he couldn’t go on until he’d taken off his shoe and scratched it properly.

The sudden movement of the white picket gate of the Police House, for which he’d kept one eye cocked on the rural scene reflected in the car mirror, caught him by surprise. Sergeant Digby had transacted his business with remarkable despatch.

But then the Sergeant Digbys of this world would transact all their business smartly in their accelerated progress to the top, he decided, watching the young man’s light infantry advance. The Good Fairy at the Digby christening had endowed that infant with every virtue necessary for success in the police service, except perhaps an extra portion of imagination. And even that, when one thought about it, might have proved more of a hindrance than a help in his superiors’ eyes, if it had been granted.