‘Subtler?’ Mick repeated. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Don’t ask the lads directly if anything unusual happened,’ Blackstone explained. ‘Get them talking in general terms, and if anything strikes you as not quite right, say something like, “That’s odd.” Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘I think so,’ Mick said, unconvincingly.
‘The real trick to getting the right answers to important questions is to seem as if you’re not actually asking any questions at all,’ Blackstone amplified.
‘Oh, you mean I should be sneaky.’
‘Exactly.’
Mick grinned. ‘Well, why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’
Blackstone grinned back — it was hard not to.
‘You’re quite right,’ he admitted. ‘That’s just what I should have done.’
‘But say, even being very sneaky and very careful, I do find out something that could be important in the next hour or so, I should come to you straight away, shouldn’t I?’ Mick asked, bubbling over with enthusiasm again.
‘You won’t discover anything important in an hour,’ Blackstone said. ‘If you go about it in the right way, it could take you days before you come up with anything.’
‘But say I did,’ Mick persisted.
‘There’d be no point in coming back even if you’d solved the whole mystery — because I won’t be here,’ Blackstone said firmly.
‘Then I’ll go wherever you are, and-’
‘You won’t be able to do that, because I’ll be out of reach.’
Mick looked very disappointed. ‘Oh, where will you be, then?’
‘I’m off on a trip to the seaside,’ Blackstone told him.
FIFTEEN
The band — playing loud and strident military music — could be heard long before it could be seen, and a shiver of anticipation was already running through the waiting crowd.
Archie Patterson, standing in that waiting crowd, rocked on his heels in perfect contentment.
It would have been criminal to have visited the royal town of Windsor without watching the ceremonial changing of the guard at the castle, he thought — and anyway, as a loyal subject of His Majesty the King, it was virtually almost his duty to grasp the opportunity when it was presented to him.
The military band appeared further down the street — tall men made even taller by the high bearskin hats they all wore, marching in perfect step, and with perfect resolution.
The American tourist who was standing next to Patterson gasped at the spectacle, and Patterson himself experienced a sudden surge of full-blown patriotic pride.
Behind the band came the New Guard, led by a captain with his sword drawn and pointing to the sky.
‘Gee, they really know how to do things over here in England,’ the American woman said to her husband.
‘It’s just a show, honey,’ the husband growled back. ‘It doesn’t actually mean anything.’
Patterson chuckled to himself.
The disgruntled husband sounded just like Sam Blackstone, who might have admired the discipline on display, but would have had no time for pomp and ceremony, he thought.
The New Guard entered the castle grounds, and was met by the Old Guard. The two captains approached each other, then touched left hands, which was symbolic of handing over both the keys and the responsibility for guarding the monarch.
Sam Blackstone didn’t have much time for the royal family, either, Patterson reflected — which was ironic when you considered that he had once risked his own life in order to save that of the Queen.
The New Guard had taken up its position, and the Old Guard began its march back to its barracks.
Patterson turned his back on the castle, and crossed the bridge which led into Eton. The changing of the guard, as impressive as it had been, was only an appetizer, he told himself with relish — the real treat of the day was yet to come.
Ahead of him, he could see the towers and crenellations of Eton College. The college had been founded when most of the London that he knew was still countryside. Fifteen British prime ministers — and many of the young officers now serving on the Western Front — had been educated there. It had stood on the same spot for nearly six hundred years — and if someone had assured Patterson it would still be there in another thousand, he would have accepted the assurance readily.
The closer he drew to the college, the more the ‘natives’ were in evidence — and a strange tribe they were! The boys were all wearing black tailcoats, waistcoats and pinstriped trousers, but some wore a black gown as well.
The wheels in Patterson’s encyclopaedic mind whirred and clicked.
The ones in the gowns are King’s Scholars — the brightest of the bunch, he told himself. Nicknamed tugs, from the Latin, togati — wearers of cloaks.
What else did he know?
He knew that all the older boys had one of the younger boys assigned to him as a fag — or personal servant.
He knew that when one of the senior boys — for some reason called a Library member — wanted some errand running, he simply called out ‘Boy, Up,’ and every first year boy within earshot was obliged to come running.
He knew that members of Sixth Form Select were allowed to wear silver buttons on their waistcoats, and that House Captains could wear a mottled-grey waistcoat.
And though he didn’t like to admit it, he was starting to see some point to Sam Blackstone’s disdain for pomp and ceremony.
He grinned to himself. He loved meeting people who had an unjustifiably high opinion of themselves, he thought. They were so much fun to play with.
General Fortesque sat at his desk, deep in troubled thought. He was wondering if he had been open enough with the chubby detective from Scotland Yard, or if he should have told him more.
‘You don’t know any more,’ he said aloud. ‘You do no more than suspect — and even that’s putting things too strongly.’
Besides, suspicion, if it was to be of any value, must have a firm foundation of expert knowledge, he argued to himself — just as it had always done in his soldiering days.
He thought back to a time — long ago — when he’d been in command of a small company of cavalry men, out on a routine reconnaissance mission in the high Hindu Kush.
Military intelligence had assured him before he set out that there were no hostiles in the area. His scouts had reported the same. But the enemy were not the only people not in evidence. There was no sign of the caravans of traders, bringing goods from British India across the mountain passes, either. And not a single villager had come to the camp he had established, attempting to sell dried fruits and ‘good clean girls’ to his men. They knew something — those traders and villagers — and he needed to know what that something was.
The tribesmen were planning a surprise attack, he decided. It was the only possible explanation. But where would the attack come from?
He had made a detailed study of the tactics they had used in the past, and had discussed those tactics with friendly tribal leaders, and looking round him now, he fixed his attention on a ridge in the near distance.
The enemy were behind the ridge at that very moment. He could sense it. But he knew that since it was the eve of Friday, they would never think of attacking before their holy day was over.
He deployed his men under the cover of darkness, and as dawn broke on Friday, he was ready to launch his own attack. He had still not known, even an hour before the attack, whether, by the end of the morning, he would be regarded as a hero or a fool.
‘It turned out that my suspicions were right,’ he told his study wall. ‘But I would never have had them if I hadn’t already known something about the way the Afghans thought and acted.’
So whichever way he looked at it, suspicion without knowledge was no suspicion at all. It was mere whimsy — a fancifulness quite unsuited to a military man.