Only a flag of truce could save him now.
He bowed his head. "I'm sorry, doctor—you are the expert and I'm a pig-headed layman. The plain truth is that this man Smith died very inconveniently for us, and very conveniently for someone else, so we have to be sure about his death. We're not looking for a mystery, but if there is one we daren't overlook it. And—well, surely you must have had some reservations if you felt a post-mortem was necessary?"
Fox stared at Butler thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded slowly. "Not quite a layman, colonel—
it's true that I considered a post-mortem necessary. But when there are none of the classical signs of drowning, and no visible injuries either, then it's perfectly normal."
"Would you have expected such signs?"
"Not at all. Minor injuries or the absence of them aren't significant. In a case like this it's merely a question of drawing deductions—a process of exclusion, really."
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"And you concluded—?"
Fox shrugged. "Vagal inhibition is my guess—sudden shock mediated through the vagus nerve, the
'wanderer'. I won't bore you with technicalities, but it's a very expeditious way of dying. Sir Bernard Spilsbury proved that, when he damn near killed a nurse by way of demonstrating it in a murder case."
"Spilsbury?" Butler frowned. "Would that have been the brides-in-the-bath case?"
"That's right." Fox smiled grimly. "Up with their heels— and it was all over!" He paused. "And now I take it you'd like to know whether somebody upped with Smith's heels and then dumped him in the pond?"
"That would be helpful, doctor."
"I'm sure it would be! But I'm afraid I can't help you that way at all." He leant forward, elbows comfortably on the table. "You see, the difficulty with most drownings is that the actual process is the same whether it's accident or suicide —or murder. And that's why I keep all my wits about me when I meet this sort of case. And why I do a p.m. so often."
"In this instance there was very little water in the lungs, which is what I'd expect. But it was definitely pond water, with enough weed fragments to prove it. No doubt at all. In fact there was nothing there incapable of rational explanation; add the alcohol and you can call it either accident or involuntary suicide. Myself I'd prefer to call it waste and stupidity, whatever he'd done that brings you here."
"Except, of course, I can only tell you what the state of his body tells me. What you want—and what I can't give you, colonel—is the state of his mind."
VIII
BY THE TIME the train reached the outskirts of Oxford Butler had worked himself into a fairly irascible frame of mind.
Having to abandon his comfortable, convenient Rover at Reading and surrender himself to British Rail had not helped, even though he had seen the force of Audley's argument that the false Colonel Butler ought not to launch himself in the real Colonel Butler's car.
Yet he recognised that the true cause of his disquiet was the outcome of the Pett's Pond visit. For Dr Fox's conclusions fitted his own instinct far too well to be ignored: all the evidence pointed to the purely accidental nature of Smith's death. And although there was no consequential reason to doubt his Zoshchenko identity, his connection with the KGB or any other of the Soviet overseas agencies now dummy2.htm
seemed to rest solely on a chance word embedded in the memory of an aged don who had wined and dined well before he put his ear to the phone.
True, that was exactly the sort of intelligence fragment that Audley relished—and in fairness to Audley (however much it hurt) it had to be admitted that the blighter had a nose for such things.
Also, the fact that Smith's parents were conveniently dead and all those who knew him conveniently far off in New Zealand certainly made him a likely candidate for such a substitution. So the pros and cons seemed to balance in an annoyingly inconclusive fashion, and there weren't really very many solid facts either.
He glared down at the printed page on his lap : there was no shortage of facts there. Oldchesters fort—
Ortolanacum according to the Notitia Dignitatum, or Ortoligium if one preferred the later Ravenna Cosmography—measured 200 metres by 130, enclosing rather more than five acres, and had variously housed 500 mounted men or a thousand infantry. In the reign of Severus it had housed the 1st Lusitanians for a time and had then been the undoubted home of the 7th Dacians, a crack cavalry regiment drawn from one of the great horse tribes the Romans had conquered.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to be transplanted from the plains of the Danube to the wild north-west frontier of the Empire.
It was not really so far from his imagination at alclass="underline" in their day the East Lancashire Rifles, drawn from the smoggy cities of industrial England, had frozen on the rim of the world above the Khyber Pass on another north-west frontier. That was fifteen hundred years later, but the price and obligation of empire, no matter whose empire, was still the same: some men must live and die far from home without questioning their fate. Indeed, it was the natural order of things, natural for the Dacians as it had been for the East Lanes.
Butler sighed. The Ala Daciana was certainly not to be pitied, serving its years on the Great Wall, but rather to be envied for drawing such clear-cut and honourable duty. There would be precious little call for "aid to the civil power" on the Wall.
The train gave a sudden convulsive jerk and then stopped again. For some reason that escaped Butler it had stalled just short of the Oxford platform, alongside a somewhat tatty cemetery—obviously not the last resting place of the Hobsons —as though to remind him and the other passengers of the final destination of all journeys.
The real Oxford would be on the other side, of course. His gaze followed his thought across the carriage.
The clutter of the railway sidings along the main line was dominated by a pair of enormous cranes. But beyond them he could see the famous vista of towers and spires, clustered like so many rockets on their launching pads.
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Butler frowned and shook his head. The image was altogether too fanciful for his liking: it reminded him that this was a dangerous territory for simple men, with too many private lines linking it with the centres of power and influence. Sir Frederick and Stocker had both warned him to tread carefully in it, and even Audley himself, who was a product of such a place and at home in it, had treated it with uncharacteristic respect.
But there was still no reason why he should let it throw him off balance before he had even set foot in it.
Caution and respect were one thing, but superstitious fear was another.
I can be dangerous too, in my fashion, thought Butler, tightening his regimental tie.
All the same he watched warily through the windows of the taxi which bore him towards the King's College, as though the nature of the hazards would be immediately apparent.
But at first it seemed a dull, provincial town like any other —if anything even duller, with its dingy, lavatorial station, jammed car parks and anonymous shops stacked with electrical goods and soft furnishings. Nor did the inhabitants seem any different—no flowing gowns or flowing student hair —
from those of any other provincial city.
The only distinctive thing was the number of chalked slogans, which ranged from somewhat banal appeals for action against Greece and South Africa, and support for the NLF, Women's Lib and Black Power, to the rather more intriguing contentions that Proctors are Paper Tigers and Hitler is Alive and Living in— the traffic surged forward just too quickly for him to discover where the Führer had been hiding all those years.