War Game (20 page)

“David!”

Audley woke with a start to find them both staring at him: “I’m sorry. I was just thinking. …”

“There were these two Militiamen,” prompted Mitchell. “They distracted Digby while James Ratcliffe was having his neck broken.”

“Distracted, possibly. They certainly talked to him, and one of them even restrained him, or tried to. Philip Oates and David Bishop.”

“Do you want me to look them over?” asked Frances.

“Just keep an eye open for them. Colonel Butler is running a full check on them for me at the moment. And on Robert Davenport too.”

“Where does he come in?”

“He was also on the spot at the right time. He preached a sermon on the wrath of God and the wickedness of the Royalists.”

“He’s always doing that.”

“Yes—but apparently this was a particularly good sermon. Digby couldn’t resist listening to it.”

“Which was what Davenport intended him to do, you mean?”

Audley spread his hands. “It’s another possibility.”

Mitchell nodded. “And the fourth distractor?”

“Ah, the fourth is a long shot—and one of yours, too.”

“Mine? You don’t mean he’s a Cavalier? A Royalist gentleman?”

“He is indeed. And not just any Royalist gentleman, either. Have you met Major John Lumley yet, Paul?”

“Major John—? You’re kidding!”

“Alias Black Thomas Monson of Swine Brook Field—not at all.”

“You’re still kidding. Never in a thousand years,” Mitchell shook his head vehemently, “not in a million years, either. Not John Lumley.”

“A long shot, I admit. But as Black Thomas he made a special point of telling Digby to keep on pouring his red dye into the stream. And Digby says that simply wasn’t necessary.”

“So he was just making sure Digby did his job, then.”

“Precisely. And if I was Charlie Ratcliffe’s contract man that’s the one thing I’d require of my employer: to ensure that Digby went on doing his job while I did mine. So Lumley stays on the list until we can prove otherwise.”

“A waste of time.” Mitchell’s tone was obstinate. “Gates and Bishop—maybe. Davenport—probably, from the way he talks. But John Lumley—never.”

“What makes you so sure?” asked Frances.

“I also happen to have met the man himself and I know how his mind works. And it would never work on behalf of Charlie Ratcliffe, not ever.”

“Maybe.” Lumley was the longest shot of the four, but in the circumstances the more suspects he had, the better. “You may well be right, Paul. And if you are, then he’ll emerge whiter than white from Colonel Butler’s inquiries, and I shall be perfectly happy to accept his verdict.”

“And if not?” said Frances.

“Until I hear from Butler in a few minutes’ time that’s academic. They may all be clean … they may all be dirty. But at the moment they are all suspect and we’re going to lean on all of them and see what happens. That will be when you must keep your eyes skinned.”

“Hmm …” Frances frowned slightly. “Talking of keeping our eyes skinned … there are several rather equivocal non-Roundhead types who’ve been loitering around the camp from the minute we arrived yesterday evening. And asking questions too, evidently.”

“That’s right. They’ve been lent to us by—some of our friends.”

“Well, they’re not exactly treading with fairy feet.”

“They aren’t meant to be. They’re just softening up the targets.”

“Which include Charlie Ratcliffe, I trust.” There was a faint echo of his anger in Mitchell’s voice, as though the slur cast on Major Lumley constituted a large addition to Charlie Ratcliffe’s overdue account.

“Don’t fret, Paul. We’ve been leaning on Ratcliffe since early yesterday morning.”

“How?”

“He’s been trying to raise money—and quite a lot of it, too—on the strength of his golden expectations,” Audley began.

Frances stirred at that, her long skirts rustling. “That wouldn’t be for the new printing press of his own he wants for
The Red Rat
, would it?”

“That—among other things.” Audley looked at her with interest. “Where did you hear that?”

“Oh, it’s all over the camp. And what’s more, the word is that his old printer has got wind of it, so he’s dunning Ratcliffe for all the money he owes, and Charlie’s running round in circles.” She stared back at Audley shrewdly. “You wouldn’t be behind that, by any chance?”

Mitchell laughed softly. “What—queer a chap’s credit, and then stir up his creditors with nasty malicious rumours? Do you really think David would do a thing like that? Perish the thought!”

No one could fault Brigadier Stocker for speed as well as judgement, reflected Audley. The word was not only out, but it was moving in directions they hadn’t expected, like the smell of Stalky’s dead pussy-cat under the ceiling joists.

“Yes … well, he is finding money tighter all of a sudden,” he admitted. “That is, tighter than a young man with great expectations ought to find it.” He turned towards Mitchell. “Which brings us to your gold, Paul.”

The cavalier face twisted. “And don’t I wish it was! Two million, two and a half million, I could rub along on that. It makes you weep.”

“Finders keepers, losers weepers,” murmured Frances.

“Finders is right. And as for weepers … yes, I should think the King of Spain must have dropped a tear or two when the
Conception
never showed up.”

The sound of a distant drum, a brief, brittle tattoo beaten by a single drummer, echoed through the open dormer window from across the valley. Audley could see small figures with tall pikes assembling in the gap where the road down to the bridge cut through the skyline. Someone was waving a flag with the sweeping theatrical gestures of a Tyrone Guthrie production.

“Nothing to worry about,” Mitchell reassured him. “The war doesn’t start until three o’clock. In fact it can’t start without me anyway—I’m galloping back with the news of Cromwell’s approach.”

“Well, what’s all the fuss up there for?” Audley pointed.

“They don’t trust each other,” said Frances.

Audley frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“She’s right—we don’t trust each other.” Mitchell leant out of the window, staring downwards to the left. “Here … look down there by the bridge.”

He drew back to let Audley take his place. The line of the little river was thick with trees and even from the high window the heavy foliage of summer concealed whatever might be happening beneath them. But in a gap between two immense chestnuts he could see the bridge itself, and the cluster of Royalists who guarded it, heavily armed with muskets and beer tankards.

He turned back, still frowning. “I still don’t understand.”

Frances made a face. “I told you, David —they’re weird. They have these strict rules, and on one level the whole thing’s a childish game. But … I don’t know … on another level it isn’t a game at all. I get the feeling that what they’d really like is to play it for real, with real pikes and real guns. And that one day that’s what it will be.”

Audley nodded slowly. “I see. And the side that starts first wins—hence the pickets on guard?”

“I don’t know. They would say that it’s just a convention—and it gives the crowds a kick to see that they’re taking precautions against a surprise attack… . But it’s more than that. It’s not simply that they don’t trust each other. They don’t
like
each other.”

Audley’s eyes were drawn to the window again as another drummer started drumming, this time from the Royalist lines. He was beginning to understand the full implications of Superintendent Weston’s unease: under the cloak of seventeenth-century history the Double R Society seemed to have managed to break the rule that politics must never put on a uniform. To haul any of these people up in court, where they could always take refuge behind their historical knowledge in their ludicrous seventeenth-century language, would make the law a laughing-stock. But here they were, drilled and organised on the divisive basis of late twentieth-century politics nevertheless.

But that was Weston’s problem. Or, if there really was anything in it, he could pass it on himself to the Minister as an addendum to his final report; there might well be something for the lawyers to get their sharp little teeth into in those political questions the membership committees had put to these children of his. In the meantime he had other fish to fry.

He looked at Mitchell. “Tell me about Ratcliffe’s gold, Paul.”

Mitchell relaxed into a frayed old cane chair beside the rocking-horse. “Not Ratcliffe’s gold, David. The King of Spain’s gold, for my money—the property of His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip IV.”

“Spanish gold?”

“Oh, no. Not Spanish gold—American gold. Or, to be strictly fair, Spanish-American gold. The gold of the fabled Indies.”

“You mean there’s scientific proof for that?”

“I do—and there is. The BM let one of their metallurgists loose on it, and he had himself a field day. I can’t honestly say I understand all his jargon, but the burden of it is that you can fingerprint gold like everything else. Some of the differences you can see with the naked eye. Apparently it ranges from deep gold-yellow to yellowish-white if there’s a high silver content. But the real scientific clincher is the minute traces of other metals—all sorts of weird and wonderful elements are present in its natural state, according to where it was mined. Even with the modern stuff there are ways and means of narrowing down the source, like whether it comes from the Urals or South Africa. And with pre-1850 gold, when refining techniques weren’t so sophisticated, it’s even easier.

And this is pre-1850.”

“Oh, sure. The comparison tests don’t pin down the age more precisely than that, but it’s definitely Spanish-American, mostly from Peru and Colombia, with a bit of Mexican from Sonora and Chihuahua probably.”

“Any stamps on it?”

“Stamps?” For a moment Mitchell looked mystified. “Oh—die-stamps or whatever … no. But then the ingots are pretty crude, not even to any standard weight, which suggests that it was melted down again to remove whatever official marks there were on it originally.”

“By Edward Parrott, you mean?”

Mitchell shrugged. “Edward or Nathaniel, your guess is as good as mine. But Edward for choice, I suppose. It isn’t at all difficult to melt gold, but he wouldn’t have had much time to do it in ‘43 and I doubt whether Spanish royal mint marks would have worried him very much, either, come to that. … So more likely it was Edward.” Mitchell’s white teeth showed under his moustache for a second. “A very warm man, Sir Edward. He knew his gold was hot, so he heated it up again—if you’ll pardon the puns.”

And a very warm young man, Paul Mitchell, too. There wouldn’t be much by now that he didn’t know about 1643, his insatiable curiosity would have seen to that.

“But then, again, it could have been Nathaniel who did the re-heat,” went on Mitchell. “I’ve talked to a chap who was a vet in the Army in Burma in ‘45—1945, that is. He actually knew more about mules than horses and ponies, but his estimate of how much a Dartmoor pony can carry for any length of time comes to the average weight of any eight of Charlie Ratcliffe’s ingots, almost exactly. Which is a thought, you know… . Not that it accounts for Charlie’s brilliant original detective work, of course.”

“And have you got any leads on that?”

“A little.” Mitchell’s tone was smugly casual. “You know the BBC’s doing a TV programme on it?”

“In ‘The Testimony of the Spade’ series, yes. BBC Two.”

“Ah, well I’m told things have hotted up now. It’s rescheduled for peak viewing on BBC One. They’ve got a Cambridge Don by the name of Nayler as link man.” Mitchell looked sidelong at Audley. “You wouldn’t know him by any chance, David?”

Too casual by half, that question.

“He was up at the same time as I was.”

And too casual by half, that reply, damn him!

“I rather thought so.”

“Have you spoken to him, then?”

“Have I spoken to him?” Mitchell’s lip curled and suddenly he was all seventeenth-century again. “Professor Bloody Nayler was my tutor for one brief —mercifully brief—period. Even if I crawled to him—which I don’t intend to do—he wouldn’t give me the time of day.” Amusement slowly displaced cold anger. “I’m relieved to see that you dislike him as much as I do. But why the hell didn’t you drown him in the Cam when he was a puppy?”

“Get to the point, Paul.”

“The point?” The glint of amusement went off abruptly. “The point is that other people dislike him equally. So a girl I know in the BBC was quite happy to show me his draft script—and talk about what’s not in it yet.”

“And what is … not in it?”

Mitchell sat forward. “Nobody knows— yet. But Ratcliffe and Nayler have cooked up a deal between them, that’s for certain. What’s in the script at the moment is their joint version of how the gold got to Standingham—Nayler’s constructed most of that and Ratcliffe is going to give him the credit for being a clever fellow. But that’s all just scene-setting for the big stuff, which is going to be filmed
in situ
next Saturday, when they re-enact the storming of Standingham Castle. Charlie’s going to explain, blow by blow, what a clever fellow
he
was, and Nayler’s going to stand on the sidelines and say ‘Here! Here!’ and ‘I told you so’ at intervals. But that’s all under wraps at the moment—the producer doesn’t like it, but he knows he’s on to a hot news story so there’s nothing he can do about it with Charlie and Nayler ganging up on him.”

“But surely they know what happened during the siege—and at the storming?” said Frances. “I mean, I’ve heard people talking about it in camp already.”

“They know the facts about the siege and the storming, sure. But not about the gold and how it was hidden.” Mitchell swung back to Audley quickly. “It wasn’t hidden in the house, that they do know. It was out in the grounds somewhere, apparently right out in the open. And he did go straight to it, like the papers say; he dug pretty deep before he hit on it, according to information received. The place was like a ploughed field when he’d finished.”

Audley nodded. “But how does all this help us?”

“It doesn’t, at least not yet. But my little BBC girl had one very interesting bit of scuttlebutt—in fact she thinks she knows how Charlie got on to the gold. Or at least how he was so sure it was there when everyone else said no. Because she did the routine research on Charlie himself— there’s going to be some scene-setting stuff about his Maoist-Leninist revolutionary background, he’s insisted on that. This is gold for the people, is his line—not gold for Charlie Ratcliffe. And he’s going to spend it in the service of the people.”