especially if the editors started knocking each other off, as well, eh?' He shook his head again. 'No . . . putting O'Leary on to Jack Butler was too heavy to ignore: we had to sit down and find out why. Because Jack's a great chap. But he's not irreplaceable — even after your godfather's "accidental"
death there were other candidates — ' The lip curled once more ' — including me even, faute de mieux . . . Except that I wasn't willing. Because I don't like the paperwork — the managing, as they say? Because I'm not a civil servant at heart: I'm a leopard who's too old to change his spots, Miss Fielding.'
Arrogant bugger! But then Philly had been pretty arrogant, too! But . . . she mustn't interrupt —
'So there had to be a reason.' He repaid her restraint by continuing. 'And we very soon came up with one. Because Jack was promoted, then he had access to a lot of highly-dummy2
restricted files. So we thought . . . once he sees those files, then he'll see something no one else has, maybe? So ... they can't afford for him to see them . . . maybe?'
He looked at her, and she realized that he wanted her to react now, to prove that she understood. 'Like . . . there was a traitor somewhere? What Mr Le Carre calls "a mole" — ?'
He shrugged. 'Yes. Or ... it could be that they'd deceived us somehow, with a piece of disinformation. They're damn good at that — feeding us with a great big pack of lies ... or feeding the Yanks, or the Frogs, or the Krauts ... or Mossad, and then they feed us . . . and we all believe it, and act accordingly — ?'
He almost grinned at her, but didn't. 'If you start off from the wrong place, then you usually end up at the source of the Nile, and you think you've made a great discovery. So you don't notice the boat they've moored on the Thames, alongside Westminster . . .' He repeated the almost-but-not-grin. 'Don't ask me, Miss Fielding. Because I won't tell you.'
But he was self-satisfied. So he had come up with an answer.
And all he wanted to do was to wrap up the question in the Official Secrets Act, so that he could shrug off his answer, in turn. So she had to get the question right. 'But . . . you had Sir Jack Butler there, beside you, after that. So . . . if he did see those files — ?'
David Audley beamed at her. 'Absolutely right, Miss Fielding: we had him there beside us — ' Then the beam dulled.
'What's the matter, Dr Audley?'
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'Nothing — ' He was uneasy for a moment. Then he was himself again. ' — your Mr Ian Robinson is talking to my wife, with your Mr Buller . . . and to my daughter. And I was merely wondering what they were saying down there — ' He jerked his head ' — in the rocks down there — ?'
Jenny remembered the pointy-eared fox, which was also somewhere down there in the rocks. But it was beyond her imagination, what they were all up to now, down there: Ian and Reg and the pointy-eared fox, never mind Audley's wife and his daughter, after Paul Mitchell's two failed shots, and then that burst of gunfire, the turret-gun's concluding broadside.
But there was no one there in the rocks. 'What did you discover, Dr Audley?'
He made another ugly face. 'It took us a long time, Miss Fielding. And Paul Mitchell worked longer than I did.' He stared at her, and then nodded. 'Because your Mr Robinson is right — O'Leary wasn't enough for him: he wanted whoever was behind what happened at Thornervaulx.' Nod.
'And so did I, come to that.' Another nod. 'But for a quite different reason.'
'A quite different — ?'
He shook his head again. 'But we didn't find anything — not even with old Jack alongside us: we didn't find a damn thing: not a happening, not a policy, not a name, not even a smell —
nothing.'
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Jenny junked Paul Mitchell with Frances Fitzgibbon: they had been, respectively, infantryman and infantry-woman who had fought and died in the front line, and of no interest to the historian's deeper truth.
'Paul worked all hours God sent — 8 A.M. to midnight. Or later, sometimes, I suspect.' Audley tested her. 'I don't know ... I went home each night. But he was always there next morning, when I came in, Miss Fielding.'
As with Reg Buller, so with David Audley. And as with Reg Buller, so with Ian Robinson too: whatever spell she cast across the years from Thornervaulx, Frances Fitzgibbon really must have been quite a woman, to ensnare them all like this, in all their different ways, thought Jenny enviously.
Except that Frances- Marilyn Fitzgibbon- Francis was dead now: so sod her!
So she waited.
'One morning, I came in ... And Paul said "There's nothing here, David; the bastards have beaten us. Or Jack can't remember anything, anyway. So, even if O'Leary hadn't been so damned incompetent and done the job properly . . . either at the University, or at Thornervaulx ... it wouldn't have made any difference. Because there's nothing here."'
Jenny still waited.
'And then it was easy, of course.' Audley nodded.
'Easy?' He wasn't talking about the woman now.
'O'Leary was the best — the best, Miss Fielding.' He nodded.
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'Your Paddy MacManus wasn't in the same class: he was just a pale carbon-copy of the real thing.' He cocked his head dismissively towards the dispersing column of smoke in the plain between the Greater and Lesser Arapiles. 'O'Leary might have screwed up once, if he'd had very bad luck. And he did have very bad luck, when Frances Fitzgibbon turned up out of the blue, at Thornervaulx. But he didn't have any bad luck at the University. And he must have had Jack Butler right in his sights at Thornervaulx.' He stared at her. 'What my old Latin master used to say . . . God rest his lovely soul! . . . was that "nonsense must be wrong!", Miss Fielding.'
Still, he stared. 'What if O'Leary didn't screw up? What if he did exactly what they paid him to do — to make us concentrate on Jack Butler — and not on Philip Masson?'
'And then it was easy', just as he had said: it was like the scales falling from her eyes, in the Bible story she'd once had to learn by heart, to take her O-level Religious Studies exam.
He saw that she understood. 'The irony is that dear Frances deceived us both: because of her we both had blinkers on: we couldn't think of anything except her — and Jack Butler. And we weren't getting any answer because we were asking the wrong question. But we got there at last, anyway.' Audley nodded. 'Your "Philly" was a great guy, Miss Fielding: we did him over after that, right from his birth to what we no longer believed was his accidental death. Although we still believed that he'd been drowned, of course — we never expected him to turn up again. And it took us a long time, I can tell you . . .
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Because we couldn't ask any of our questions obviously — in case we alerted the Other Side.' Nod. 'Because, either way —
if he was theirs, or if he wasn't — we didn't want to let them know that we were on to them. Because that would have given the game away.'
Jenny felt her mouth fall open.
'No — he wasn't on their side, my dear.' Audley reassured her quickly. 'Your "Philly" was absolutely on ours, you have no need to worry.'