War Game (18 page)

The muscle twitched again. “You could say that, sir—yes.”

“I am saying that, Sergeant. If it had been after the rout you might have put it down to accident, but before the rout you weren’t so sure—is
that
it?”

“I couldn’t see how it had happened when it did happen, yes sir.”

“Good.” Audley lifted his gaze back to the sergeant. “Well then, Sergeant, I’d be obliged if you’d tell me how the devil you knew there was a time factor at all?”

“Sir?” Digby frowned at him.

Audley hardened his expression. “How did you know so much about the behaviour of the stream?”

Digby relaxed abruptly. “Oh—that.”

“That, yes.”

“Because we don’t leave anything to chance, sir.” Digby smiled at him innocently. “When we stage a battle we do it properly. … So I gave the dye a trial run a week before, to find the best place for it, and I tried this pool first because the gap here was more sheltered than the one downstream. But it took too long—and it spread the dye too much.” He pointed downstream. “What we needed was for the water to be good and red where Black Thomas was due to drink it, and still pink when it reached the road bridge where the crowd could see it. So in the end we decided on the big willow as the best place.”

“We?”

“The Special Effects Section … sir,” amended the sergeant politely.

Good boy
, thought Audley. If you have to kick the top brass, always kick them politely.

“I see. And everyone knew about this, I take it?”

“It’s in the battle scenario, sir— Appendix F.” Digby nodded. “Everyone has to know exactly what’s happening, otherwise things are bound to go wrong. We’ve learnt that by bitter experience. So you see—“

Audley smiled into the stillness of his study, remembering the sergeant’s meticulous account of the battle of Swine Brook Field with admiration.

Such a curious mixture, that account had been. Mostly it was still the formal recollection of a policeman trained to give evidence, but every now and then the youthful Civil War buff shone through, illuminating a sombre landscape of fact with shafts of enthusiasm.

He thought of Digby lying in the narrow bed in the spare room at the end of the passage, which had once been his own childhood bedroom, and realised without surprise that the thought was already edged with something close to affection.

It was hard to think of the boy as a police sergeant. If he had married young he could have had a son that age, and Digby could have occupied that bed as of right. To have a sharp son like that to put him in his place would be rather agreeable… .

He was growing old, and the measure of his years was that he was already beginning to relive his youth through those who still had the whole exciting game to play … and who could still do all the things he had somehow missed doing.

Neither Faith nor Superintendent Weston needed to worry: he would keep an eye on young Henry Digby. A protective eye.

And the irony now was that in that very responsibility lay the key to the murder of James Ratcliffe on Swine Brook Field, which Weston and Digby himself had both missed.

The red dye—the tell-tale red dye—had been an unforeseen accident. But Henry Digby’s presence twenty yards from the killing had been a well-known fact. A fact well known to Charlie Ratcliffe.

A fact Charlie Ratcliffe could not afford to overlook: Sergeant Digby of the Mid-Wessex Police Force.

He stared down at the four names which he had written on his blotter.

ON THE CORNER
of Easingbridge Village Green nearest the Ploughman’s Arms public house a yellow-coated musketeer was vomiting up his heart and a quantity of beer, oblivious of his admiring audience of small children. Two of his comrades, obviously in little better condition, lay stretched out on the grass nearby, their muskets and bandoliers at their side. And from the pub itself came the sound of drunken, but nonetheless distinct singing—

Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair?
Parlez-vous, parlez-vous!
Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair,
With lily-white tits and golden hair?
Inky-pinky parlez-vous.

Audley manoeuvred the 2200 into a vacant slot in the pub forecourt, reflecting as he did so that if the song was anachronistic (“Three German Officers crossed the Rhine”, which as he recalled was its first line, if not its title, could hardly be earlier than 1914), the condition of the singers was no doubt historically impeccable: from the position of the village on the western slope of the Easing valley, with the river between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell’s advancing raiders, the cavaliers must have been stoned out of their minds to let their enemies round them up so easily in broad daylight back in 1644. Mere incompetence couldn’t stretch that far, only booze would answer the case.

He switched off the engine and picked up the leaflet which had been thrust through his window at the traffic jam by the bridge. It was crudely printed, but the map on one side told its story simply and directly: Cromwell, the cunning sod, had feinted at the bridge to draw the Royalists’ attention directly across the river while actually sending the greater part of his brigade up river to cross by a convenient ford. Once across the river, his men had swept down on the enemy’s flank; whereupon the attackers at the bridge had advanced in earnest and had turned the Royalist defeat into a rout.

It all looked nice and clear-cut; suspiciously so, indeed. But the reality had probably been very different, he thought, remembering what Captain (alias Sergeant) Henry Digby had told him that very morning. This had actually been the future dictator’s very first truly independent command, the raid to stop the King transferring his artillery from the Severn Valley to Oxford. If he had fluffed it, the odds were that he might not have been given his chance as Fairfax’s second-in-command in the coming campaign—the Naseby campaign which made his reputation as a cavalry general.

By the time he’d reached the Easing valley he’d already fought two successful actions, smashing three of the Earl of Northampton’s regiments in Oxfordshire and then bluffing the Bletchingdon House garrison into surrender. But he still had everything to play for, and it would all have gone for nothing if those Royalist pickets at the upstream ford had been made of sterner stuff.

He stared down at the crumpled paper in his hand, at the black arrow which marked the line of the approach march, the river crossing and the flank attack. So that was how it had been done.

Old Cow Ford.

It wasn’t even a proper name—more likely it had been just “the old cow ford near Easingbridge”. But that was where history had been made—and changed— nevertheless.

Sweating, muddy horses and sweating, swearing men filing through the thick woods above the valley; jingling harness drowned by the distant sound of musket fire and cannon downstream, and maybe also diverting the attention of the Royalist pickets—“The buggers’ll be catching it down by the bridge. Better them than us, though”; and then the terrible long cavalry swords drawn, the straight basket-hiked swords of the New Model Army …

And then General Cromwell’s men were across the Old Cow Ford. And General Cromwell was on his way to the Cotswolds —and to Naseby, and the Palace of Westminster and the conquest of three kingdoms.

Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke, foolishly believing a false report that Cromwell had been defeated and slain by Lord Goring, allowed his men to partake of a great quantity of fresh-brewed ale, so that on the morrow they were in no condition to withstand the onset of the Ironsides, when they came upon them untimely—

The black and white of the pamphlet registered. So he’d been literally and absolutely spot on with his first guess: in executing his flank attack (which, if it was well-advised, was still no great military innovation), God’s Chosen Instrument of Vengeance owed more to the stupidity of his adversary than to Divine Providence, which usually received the credit for Crowning Mercies in those far-off days. Though perhaps the presence of that “great quantity of fresh-brewed ale” was in the nature of Divine Providence at that, constituting as it did a temptation which no British soldiers—and above all no English cavaliers of the seventeenth century—could be expected to resist.

But no matter. If there were such things as omens, it was a good omen that his instincts were working. And perhaps even a good omen twice over: Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke had joined the great company of defeated commanders because he had thought himself in the clear, had relaxed his guard, and then had been stampeded into the wrong counter-action.

And that, more or less, was the battle scenario for the defeat of Charlie Ratcliffe at this instant.

A crash of broken glass within the Ploughman’s Arms, followed by a loud cheer, roused him from his military reflections just as a dark shadow loomed in the corner of his eye outside the car.

“Are you all right, sir?”

The dark shadow was a large policeman.

“Perfectly, thank you. Why shouldn’t I be?”

The policeman sniffed suspiciously. “That’s not for me to say, sir. But I’ve been watching you for the last four or five minutes and—“

There was another loud crash from the Ploughman, and a further outbreak of cheering which blended into the unforgettable strains of “The Ball of Kirriemuir”. The policeman, who was young and fresh-faced and astonishingly like Sergeant Digby, lifted his nose from the car window and gave the pub a long, hard look as though calculating the breaking-strength of its structure under internal pressure.

The distraction gave Audley a moment to gather his wits. He had been sitting hunched down, slumped as though asleep, outside a pub where a great quantity of ale, fresh-brewed or otherwise, was being consumed—slumped in a car.

He was therefore about to be breathalysed.

“You should be worrying about them, not me, officer.” He smiled up at the young constable.

“Sir?” The candid eyes fastened on him again.

“I said—you should be worrying about them.”

“They aren’t in charge of cars, sir.”

Trust the police to get their priorities exactly right. Good on you, copper!

“Of course.” He passed up his identification card. “I’m on official business, officer … and, for the record, I haven’t had anything to drink, either.”

The eyes scanned the card, checked the face against the photograph, scanned the card again.

“Thank you, sir.” There was no change in the voice as the card came back through the window; a potential offender against section umpteen of the Road Traffic Act was no different, until breathalysed, from one of Her Majesty’s servants on his lawful occasion. “Can I be of assistance in any way?”

“I’m looking for Bridge House—Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth.”

“Just on down the road, sir. The big stone place directly overlooking the bridge —you can’t miss it.”

“I see—thank you, officer.” Audley reached for the ignition.

“But you’d do better to leave your car here, sir. I’ll keep an eye on it. The yard at Bridge House is full of horses.”

“Full of—horses?”

The constable nodded, deadpan. “That’s right, sir. The Royalist cavalry— it’s their headquarters. But it’s only a step from here.”

Audley couldn’t prevent himself from looking across the gleaming new cellulose of the car bonnet towards the Ploughman, from which some of the more esoteric verses of “Kirriemuir” were now issuing.

The young constable caught the look.

“That’s all right, sir. Your car won’t come to any harm. I shall be here until they close.”

I shall be here. A pub full of well-oiled soldiery, armed cap-a-pied, but I shall be here.

The constable grinned. “It’s just high spirits—they don’t make any real trouble. It’d be more than their lives are worth if they did, their own people ‘ud court martial ‘em double quick. And with me out here …” He shook his head. “No trouble at all.”

“And no one drunk in charge of a horse?”

“Cavalry don’t drink, sir—they’re very strict about that.”

“And the infantry?”

“No car keys. They collect all the keys and label ‘em the night before, and the general has ‘em under lock and key.
And
they put up a £50 bond with the publicans, for broken glasses and such like … so the only thing they’ve got to worry about is running out of beer.” He shook his head again. “Much better to let them let off steam. And they’ll all be sweating off the beer this afternoon, anyway.”

Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth was a tall, very thin, stooping old man, with washed-out blue eyes and short, untidy grey hair that stood up at the back as though he had allowed it to dry in the wrong position and had forgotten to brush it.

As soon as he had established to his own satisfaction that Audley was who he claimed to be he gestured him into the long, shadowy hall of Bridge House with curious jerky movements of a hand the fingers of which were crooked into a permanent arthritic claw, fussy imprecise movements which made it difficult to imagine that the same hand, strong and supple with youth, had once wrestled a bomb-laden Lancaster into the air.

“Up the stairs, up the stairs … right to the top, right to the top—door in front of you, straight in front of you, white door, brass handle—waiting for you there. Ringside view, too.”

Audley wasn’t sure what “ringside view” meant, but that would no doubt reveal itself beyond the white door. In the meantime he had the young constable’s courteous example to guide him.

“It’s extremely good of you to give us house-room, Air Marshal.” He paused with one foot on the bottom stair. “We’re very grateful.”

With an effort the Air Vice-Marshal straightened up and looked Audley in the eye. “No need to be. Been thanked already—by a pretty girl too, what’s more. And I expect Tommy will send me a proper bread-and-butter letter on expensive notepaper in his own good time … which reminds me: there’s a plate of sandwiches up there if you haven’t had any lunch, granddaughter cut them. And a few bottles of beer … but you tell Tommy it isn’t necessary—save the cost of a stamp, and God knows they cost enough now… . No need at all, glad to be of service for a change. Besides, makes life more exciting—battle outside and cloak and dagger inside—real cloak and dagger too, by golly.” He cackled briefly at whatever the joke was and then waved the claw again upwards. “Don’t keep them waiting —up you go. Right to the top, remember —white door straight in front of you.”