least he took snuff once before he died!'."
Audley chuckled, savouring the anecdote, and then checked himself as he caught Butler's disapproving look. "Yes . . . well, Young Hob, as they call the present Master—he's nearly 70, actually—he's a man who likes to work indirectly. That's why he approached me through Theodore Freisler."
"He intended to get through to you?"
"No shadow of doubt about it. To me through Theodore and then to Sir Frederick through me. I tell you, he prefers the indirect approach."
And also the approach that protected him best from any awkward questions if things went wrong, thought Butler. Except that that meant the Master was a worried man as well as a careful one, a man who truly believed his own warnings of doom. And as Stocker and Sir Frederick were disposed to take him seriously it might be that this business could suddenly turn into a very hot potato indeed.
The conclusions presented themselves to Butler one after another in quick succession, last of all the most daunting one: hot potatoes were objects to pass on as smartly as possible.
"Why hasn't the Department handed over all this to the Special Branch?"
"The Special Branch is not involved," Audley snapped. "And we damn well want it to stay that way—
uninvolved."
His prickliness took Butler aback. If there was one thing the Department prided itself on, it was those hard-won cooperative relations with the Branch.
But the reaction wasn't lost on Audley. "I know it's not how we usually go about things. But the Branch has its sticky fingers in student politics, and we don't want any part of that. The young blighters can sit-in or sit down as much as they like. They can lie down for all we care, if that's what turns them on.
Provided it's all their own idea, not something somebody else wants them to do to further some other idea."
"Somebody being the Russians."
"Russians, Martians—it doesn't matter who. But in this case the Russians, yes."
Butler scowled. "What the hell do they hope to get out of it?"
Audley maintained a poker face. "Perhaps the Master of King's will be able to tell you. But I can tell you what we stand to lose."
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"What?"
"Just suppose the Press got hold of Comrade Zoshchenko. It's bad enough the way the public feels about the students as it is. But what price the Council for Academic Freedom if someone came up with a genuine subversion story? Christ, man—it'd set higher education back years. And then we'd have a real student problem on our hands."
Butler nodded slowly. There might or might not be a plot of some sort, though he found it hard to believe even now, after Eden Hall. But there was the makings of a spectacular scandal, that was certain.
And from such a scandal one might expect a fierce anti-student backlash.
If that was the aim it was clever, but not new. Indeed, it was no more than another version of the technique being used at the very moment by the IRA gunmen in Northern Ireland: Make your enemy repressive. And if he isn't so by nature, make him so by provocation.
"Then why haven't they blown the gaff on Zoshchenko already?" he asked suddenly, as the thought struck him.
Audley shook his head. "That's what really scares me, Butler. Because it means that scandal isn't their objective, it's just something extra we've got to worry about. I've a feeling that they must be playing for much higher stakes than that. And I can tell you—I don't like the feeling one little bit."
VII
IT WAS A very small gap through which Neil Smith had broken into Pett's Pond, and thereby from Earth to Heaven— or to wherever would give houseroom to Paul Zoshchenko.
Indeed, it had hardly been a gap at all, more the sort of dog-eared hole small boys made at their natural break-in point where the hedge and the council's road safety fence met. Even now, when it had been enlarged and trampled, it was insignificant: a very small gap.
Butler retraced his steps carefully along the soggy bank, ducking under the spindly alder branches, and heaved himself back to the roadside. As he steadied himself on the splintered end of the fence he felt the post move under his hand. Either it had been already loose, or maybe Smith had given it a passing clout on his way to the pond: it was impossible to say, because every mark of his passage had been overprinted with other people's slide and slither.
But he had expected no less, and it had not been for any tangible clues that he had broken his journey at Pett's Pool. If there was anything to be had here it lay in the trained memories of Charon's assistants, the local constable and the police surgeon.
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The first of these stood waiting for him beside the Rover, well-built, fresh-faced, stamping his boots on the gravel like a young carthorse impatient at having to stand still when the day's work still lay ahead of him.
"Not much to see there," Butler said gruffly, brushing down his overcoat ineffectually.
"Too much, sir. Half the village was there before me!"
No apologies, that was a good sign. When Smith's body had been spotted by schoolchildren taking their short cut along the far margin of the pond the Constable had been measuring up an early morning collision two or three miles away. Now he was making no bones about it, trusting Butler to know that a man couldn't be everywhere, and was therefore seldom at the right spot.
"They had him out and they tried to give him the kiss of life, sir. And they spotted his motor-cycle in the water—it's not very deep anywhere and there was a big patch of oil on the surface—so they looked to see if there was anyone ridin' pillion."
Butler looked at the stagnant pond with distaste. One public-spirited soul had stripped off and groped among the weeds, while another, even braver, had set his mouth to those cold lips, an act as admirable as it had been useless.
With a shrug he turned his back on the pond and stared up and down the empty road. From this point on to the bend he had a clear view in both directions for two hundred yards or more. Ahead of him the road ran straight into the open countryside and to his left the first of the cottages of the village was tucked among the trees perhaps fifty yards beyond the further tip of the crescent-shaped stretch of water behind him.
"Nobody heard anything?"
"No, sir," the Constable shook his head. "Old Mr Catchpole in the last house there—he's half deaf anyway, so he has his television switched on full. He was watching Match of the Day until about 11 and then the midnight film until 12.55, so he wouldn't have heard it."
"That was when it happened?"
"Dr Fox said it might have been about then. If you want to have a word with him—"
"All in good time, constable." Everything pointed to the young fellow's efficiency—he had taken the trouble to talk to the occupant of the nearest house on the off-chance of evidence, even in an open-and-shut road accident. So perhaps an off-chance lay in him too—"What do you think happened?"
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The constable looked at him doubtfully. Open-and-shut it might have seemed, but it wouldn't seem like that to him now, with a mysterious Colonel Butler nosing about, armed with exalted Home Office credentials and authorisation from the Chief Constable himself. But an outsider nonetheless, and it would be dead against his training and inclination to hypothesise to such a person, colonel or not.
Butler assumed the interested expression of a seeker after wisdom. Evidently the marrow would have to be coaxed from this bone.
"Has there ever been an accident here before?"
The constable relaxed slightly. "About ten years ago there was a bus went off the road. That was long before my time of course, but I've heard tell of it enough times. He was going too fast, the driver—that's the reason for nine out of ten of the accidents I've seen, when you come down to it, sir—but it's true the bend's much sharper than it seems, more a corner than a bend, and the camber's not good at all. So it seems like he just drifted into it gradually—went into the pond down there—" he pointed towards the village.