'Right.' Buller leered at him for an instant, then raised Ian's empty glass for the barmaid to see, and then came back to him. 'Or, rather . . . wrong.'
'Wrong?' He covered his own beer with his hand to stop her getting the wrong idea.
dummy2
'It was an ambush all right.' Buller reached across him to surrender his glass for refilling. 'But it was O'Leary who was doing the ambushing, not Audley's lot.'
This time it was stronger than hypothesis. But it was still no better than circumstantial. And good old-fashioned incompetence could yet turn those circumstantial elements on their head. 'What makes you so sure?'
Buller waited until his glass was returned to him. 'Terry talked to someone there — there's two or three houses by the ruins. One of 'em was the custodian's . . . Ministry of Works, or National Trust, or whatever it was then. An' he said there was a police car parked in the car park, large as life, on the forecourt, where the coaches and the day-trippers off-load —
blue light on the top, day-glow orange-and-red strip along the side — from midday onwards. Plus other cars, that looked official. Not toufist cars, anyway . . . apart from the fact it was a November day — November 11 to be exact. . . An'
that was why old Terry was round there: he was goin' to interview this CND Vicar, who was saying he wasn't goin' to encourage the British Legion in their militaristic practices —
huh!' Reg Buller tossed his head derisively. ' Anyway ... it was a wet November Saturday — it 'ud been pissing with rain earlier, but it was down to a fine drizzle when Terry comes on the scene, just behind a couple of police cars. And there were several big home matches that weekend, too. So there weren't any tourists sight-seeing, to complicate matters.'
That was typical Buller understatement, after he had just dummy2
enormously complicated what had seemed before to be a neatly open-and-shut episode of counter-intelligence anti-terrorist operations.
'Except the one girl, who was killed.' All this made the poor little thing's death even more poignant: her presence there, late in the afternoon on a wet November day, had been against the odds; and maybe the only target O'Leary had seen when he had failed to find his proper target for the second time in succession. But that raised a much more important question. 'So . . . who was he after, Reg — O'Leary — ?' He frowned at Buller, as the more important question suddenly offered an answer which was dangerous because it was also much too quick, much too simple.
'Yes.' Buller had been there before him, and had also seen the same dangers. 'If it was Audley he was going for — if Audley was at the university, just before . . .' He cocked his head.
And then straightened it to get at his beer. And then came back to Ian. 'A bit too easy — eh?'
Ian drank the last of his own beer. All this was following on their established technique: in any investigation, one had to start somewhere.
Sometimes it was easy, and one started at the beginning. But more often than not there was no clear beginning: the more one researched, the further back the beginning went, in that first month's careless gadarene rush at the subject, open-minded. And out of that their line would come (usually out of Jenny's greater gathering of fact, and rumour, and fiction . . .
dummy2
and his own final interpretation of all that).
'What d'you think, Reg?' He mustn't let the man go off the boil.
'I dunno . . .' Buller stared down into his glass. 'But . . . even without that bugger Masson ... we could 'ave a good one 'ere, y'know . . .'
That was another sign: Reg only dropped all his aitches either deliberately or in extremis with clients — at least, apart from when he also deliberately did so to annoy John Tully.
'A good one?'
'Aye. An' thass the truth.' Buller slurred again. 'We do O'Leary . . . and maybe we've got O'Leary gunning for Audley, an' Audley gunning for O'Leary — an' that's bloody good.' He cocked an eye at Ian again. 'But if we add Masson to it ...
O'Leary versus Audley — that's simple. But Audley versus Masson . . . that's bloody complicated, I tell you.'
Suddenly there was no contest, no choice: always, and forever, doing the easy thing — dating the girl who'd say 'yes', in preference for the other girl, who'd already said 'no' — was never worth doing. 'Was Masson involved in the O'Leary killing?'
Buller shook his head. 'God only knows.' Then he looked at Ian sidelong. 'Old Johnny'll maybe answer that, when he comes in out of the cold. Because when that bomb went off, an' killed those ducks on the duck-pond ... he was just a dummy2
senior civil servant, Masson was. An' then, three days for O'Leary, an' a week for Masson . . . an' then they've got something in common, see?'
Then they were both dead, Ian saw. (But that had not been apparent at the time, except by eventual inquest verdict long afterwards. But that, also, was what had started all this now.) He cast around for further objections, taking his accustomed role with Jenny, of Devil's advocate. 'In common with the girl
— ' He fished for the elusive name in his memory, from the follow-up newspaper reports ' — Sandra — ? Marilyn — ?'
'Marilyn.' Buller set his empty glass down on the table. Then he looked up, directly and disconcertingly at Ian, challenging him. 'You know why I started with Thornervaulx — an' the bomb that killed the ducks — ?'
No ducking that challenge. 'The timing.' They both knew the rules. 'We have to start somewhere.'
The challenge remained in place, like a gauntlet thrown down which he somehow hadn't noticed. 'The bloke I talked to first, about Audley — he said "Look for anything that doesn't quite fit — anything that's somehow out of the ordinary, an' doesn't quite have an easy answer . . . An' then take another look at that ... if it's Audley you're after. Because he doesn't fit, either."'
The challenge was still there. 'How . . . doesn't Audley fit — at Thornervaulx?'
The corner of Buller's mouth twisted. 'Thornervaulx doesn't dummy2
fit — in the bloody back of beyond.'
'But he was there.'
'Aye. And one or two others with him, that Terry remembers.'
The mouth tightened. 'And Marilyn.'
Now the poor girl herself was a challenge. 'Marilyn — ?'
' "Marilyn Francis" — "shorthand typist".' Buller nodded.
'Little slip of a girl — Terry actually saw her, stretched out like a little drowned rat, when they put her in the ambulance.' Another nod. That was just when they twigged who he was — an' bloody-near thumped 'im, one of 'em did ...
an' then they tried to arrest him, before the top brass came up an' threw him out.'
Ian waited.
'"Marilyn Francis".' Buller repeated the name.
Ian waited.
There's no such person,' said Reg Buller.
4
Ian felt pleased with himself as he left the churchyard: pleased, first and foremost, because he was not being tailed (if he ever had been); but pleased, second and professionally, because it was just like old times, with the wind in his hair and the rain on his face; and he hadn't lost all his own skills, when it came to the crunch (or, anyway, it wasn't only Jenny dummy2
who was lucky as well as smart!).
Although, to be honest with himself (and he could afford to be honest now, with all the hot-bath luxury of certainty), he had to give Reg Buller his due: Reg had not only zeroed-in on
'Marilyn Francis', but had added hard investigative graft and shoe-leather to his intuition to come up with British-American Electronics.
Odd though (he thought) that it had been British-American's