Who's better than us — you and me?' The Fielding bosom inflated angrily, and pointed at him. 'Besides which, as you well know . . . once you know there's a secret, there's always a way of uncovering it — ' She caught her anger as she observed his face. 'We've done it before, Ian. We did it in Beirut — didn't we?'
'Yes.' And it was a commentary on her that she still didn't understand what a damned close-run thing that had been —
and how much the memory of it still scared him. And how much the same memory ought to frighten her. 'But this is different.'
'How — different?'
'For a start . . . because they won't let us publish. Even if Dick Woodward is willing to stick his neck out. Which he won't be.'
'Oh — come on!' The fire kindled again. 'Just because of Peter Wright, and all that ... We haven't signed the Official Secrets Act — we aren't going to publish secret documents — at least, not unless we can get hold of any, that is — ' She smiled grimly at him through the flames. The Peter Wright thing doesn't stop us: he's made it Open Season, more like — don't dummy2
you see, Ian?'
'No. I don't see. There's still the law, Jen — '
'The law?' She stopped for an instant. 'Well, I don't know . . .
But I've talked to Simon Lovell about that. And he says that practicalities are going to come into that now — or im practicalities, where they're dealing with people like us: he says that "acquisition" can't be an offence, otherwise they'd have prosecuted other people long before. And then, if we're just the teeniest bit careful . . . and he'll vet every line you write, Simon says he will . . . then there's a hell of a lot we can get away with, under "Public Interest" — Pro bono publico, as John Tully would say.' The grim smile showed again, quite different from her more mischievous grin. 'Audley won't sue.
Because they won't let him — they never defend their own.
Not like the KGB . . . But, if we're right, he won't anyway —
will he?'
They were back to one of his earliest thoughts. 'You know him — ? Do you know him, Jen?'
'Never met him in my life, so far as I know.' She frowned, as though running memories backwards. 'Big ugly fellow, apparently.' The frown cleared. 'That's a pleasure in store, darling.'
For her, anyway: 'big ugly fellows' couldn't very well thump young lady investigative-writers, certainly — not without the direst consequences. But this time, with time so short, she needed her Ian up there with her, in the forefront of the dummy2
battle. And that wasn't reassuring. 'So why are you so hell-bent on nailing him, Jen?'
'I'm not.' No smile, no grin, now: she looked as neutral as Switzerland. Yet there was a cold glitter in her eye he'd never seen before. 'But this is one book I really want to see published.'
It couldn't be avarice, surely? 'We don't need the money, Jen.
Not that badly.'
'The money?' Sudden anger replaced the coldness. 'Don't be silly, Ian. You're the one who likes money. I don't need it —
remember?'
That was hurtful — and all the more so because she intended it to be. And that wasn't really Jenny. 'I'm sorry — '
She closed her eyes for an instant. 'No! I'm the one who should be sorry. That was dirty. And you weren't being silly
— you just don't know, that's all. It was before your time —
our time.'
'Our time?' Whatever it was, it had hurt her. And whatever it was she wanted, he was going to do it for her, he realized.
'What was, Jen? 1978 — ?'
'Korea.' She produced the name like a rabbit out of a top-hat.
'Korea?' One of their future possible subjects (which, now he heard himself repeat it, Jenny herself had floated) had been the Korean phenomenon, in anticipation of all the Olympic coverage, and the possible political nastiness which might attend the event.
dummy2
Jenny nodded. 'Philip Masson was a lovely man. And he was also a Royal Marine, long ago, in Korea.'
'A Royal — ?'
'In the war — the Korean War.' She seemed to lose patience with him, where the moment before she had conceded that he couldn't know what she was talking about. 'Philly Masson carried Daddy for miles, on his back, in the middle of winter, with the Chinese shooting at them all the time — Daddy wouldn't have survived without him: he would have frozen to death before he'd died of wounds, if the Chinese hadn't finished him off, he said. Philly saved his life.' She looked at him. 'So, you could say, he saved my life, too. Because I wouldn't have been born if he hadn't done that. And ... he was my godfather, Ian. And I loved him.'
3
It was Reg Buller who put his finger on it. And he put his finger quite literally on it (and slightly drunkenly, slurring his words a little), as he stabbed the protected enlargement of the microfilmed newspaper page.
'Thish ish it! You mark my wordsh, Ian lad! Thish ish it!'
Ian had spent three good hours in the library by then, dissecting the anatomy of an almost perfect murder, albeit without ever getting close to the victim. Because, if there was dummy2
one certain thing about the death of Philip Masson, it was that he'd never actually been on board the Jenny III on the evening and night of Friday/Saturday, November 17/18, 1978.
But, equally certainly, somebody who knew his job had been on the Jenny III instead of him.
The reliable Daily Telegraph had done its own job well, in reporting the eventual inquest at length on page three.
Maybe there hadn't been a good murder trial that day, to lead the page. Or perhaps some smart editor had calculated that there might be a great many yachtsmen among the Telegraph readers, who would study every line of three columns thinking all the time this could have been me!
Time: 3.35 P.M., Saturday, November 18; Wind: South-West freshening; sea: moderate to rough —
The yacht Jenny III (no prizes for guessing why she had been so named) had been found by a fisherman, adrift ten miles south of the Needles.
There had of course been no one on board, but (or because of that) the fisherman had been observant: the mainsail had been sheeted hard home, as for close-hauled sailing, and reefed down; the working jib had been set, but was flapping; the jib sheets were lying on deck, shackle in place, but pin dummy2
missing; the tiller was lashed amidships; the navigation lights and the instruments were switched on, but the battery was almost flat. And the inflatable dinghy was rolled up and still in its locker.
He hadn't understood a great deal of that, but it had become clearer as the experts and the friends of the missing man had added their evidence and their theories bit by bit.
The Jenny III had evidently been Philip Masson's pride-and-joy ('Mr Masson, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and former Royal Marines Officer, who had won the Military Cross in Korea' — as an ex-Marine, it was no surprise that he had the smell of the sea in his nostrils, of course).
He had kept her at Lymington during the summer. She was an old Folkboat (overall length 25 feet, waterline 19.68, beam 7.22; displacement 2.16 tons), built in the '50s in traditional style, and made to last. Probably, he could have afforded something better (or so said Elwyn Rhys-Lewis, his grieving friend and a fellow yachtsman) —
'But she suited him. He often sailed her single-handed, you see, and he had her fitted out accordingly, with all the halyards led aft to the cockpit, a downhaul on the jib, and a system of cleats to hold the tiller in place if he had to go below. But she was a good sea-boat — she'd stand up to dummy2
anything the sea would throw at her. After all, Blondie Hasler sailed a Folkboat in the first single-handed race, back in 1960