"This will do," Butler muttered. He stopped and turned to McLachlan, who had fallen half-a-dozen paces behind him. "I've got some instructions for you."
"Instructions?"
"Orders would be more accurate."
McLachlan grinned at him uncertainly. "More orders? We've not finished, do you mean? I hope to God they aren't too complicated."
"They're not complicated." Butler stared directly into the wary eyes. "And this really is the finish, boy.
The game's over."
"What game?"
"Our game—and your game. All you have to do is to go back from here and pack your things up. Don't bother to see Epton—we'd rather you simply left him a note saying you've had to return to Oxford to see Sir Geoffrey Hobson—"
"See the Master? What about?"
"You aren't going to see him. You will write him a letter. You'll tell him you're resigning your scholarship and you're leaving Oxford."
"Leaving—?" McLachlan tossed the damp hair across his forehead. "Are you crazy?"
"We want it in writing, but you can keep it short. Tell him the family business makes it necessary for you to return to Rhodesia."
"Rhodesia! I'm damned if I—"
Butler overrode the angry words. "Of course we don't expect you to go there. There's a ship in the Pool dummy2.htm
of London that will suit you better—the Baltika. You have my word that no one will stop you going aboard."
McLachlan stared at him incredulously.
A good one, thought Butler with dispassionate approval. And a good one would quite naturally play to the last ball of the last over. It made it all the easier to obey Audley's parting words: we don't want any trouble, so don't make it too difficult for him. Just make the lie stick.
"It's over, lad—all kaput," he began gruffly. "It never did stand a chance, even before Zoshchenko cracked up."
McLachlan continued to stare at him for one long, bitter moment. Then slowly, almost as if the hands were disobeying the brain, the muzzle of the shotgun came up until it was in line with Butler's stomach.
Only it wasn't McLachlan any more.
It was subjective, of course; Butler knew that even as he recalled the Master's words, 'He's more mature than the usual run of undergraduates'.
And yet not wholly subjective, because the acceptance of failure was putting back those concealed years into the face, just as it must have done with Zoshchenko as his hold on Neil Smith's identity weakened at the last. Now he was watching the same struggle for that inner adjustment: he was watching the false McLachlan wither and die.
What was left was older and harder—this had been the vital half of the pair, after all. But it was still a pathetically young face, even over the shotgun's mouth.
"Don't be foolish now," said Butler gently. "Not when we're giving you the easy way out."
McLachlan licked a runnel of rain from his lip. "The— easy way?"
"Aye. I meant what I said: we're letting you go home. You've been damn lucky, lad. If Zoshchenko hadn't gone sour on you, we might have let you go and hang yourself. I think we would have done, too."
The damp strands of straw hair fell forward across the face again. Viking hair, thought Butler. But then he had read somewhere that the Vikings had also sailed eastwards, down the Russian rivers, leaving their ruthless seed there as well as in the West.
The young man licked his lips again.
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"I could have sworn you didn't know. At the bridge, I mean—" McLachlan bit off the end of the sentence as though ashamed of it.
Butler shook his head slowly. A touch of truth now, to gild the big untruth.
"I didn't know, not then. You weren't my business." Let the boy wonder which of his friends hadn't been his friend. "I didn't know until yesterday afternoon."
"Yesterday afternoon?"
"McLachlan was partially left-handed, wasn't he?"
"Yes, but—"
"Oh, you were good. You must have put in a great deal of practice. I didn't notice anything wrong, anyway."
"I don't understand. If you didn't notice anything wrong, what did you notice?"
"You made me think, lad, you made me think! You see, your left-handedness—or McLachlan's—is the rarer variety. There are plenty who bat right-handed and bowl left—Denis Compton does, and so does Derek Underwood for Kent. But not many do it the other way round. The last time I saw it was years ago, a chap named Robbie Smeaton in the Lancashire League, a spin-bowler."
"No, you were damn good." He smiled patronisingly into the young man's frowning face. "A little clumsy at times, maybe. But you even held the croquet mallet like a lefthander when you swung it between your knees."
He gestured casually at the shotgun. "Do we really need that now, lad?"
The muzzle didn't move. "Go on, Colonel."
Butler shrugged. It had been bad luck, that rare variety of left-handedness. But then the false McLachlan had dropped every game where it showed—cricket and golf and hockey— and concentrated on rugby, where it didn't show.
Every game except croquet. And in that he had schooled himself to play as the real McLachlan would have played.
"You made me think about you. You see, we had a file put together quickly on you, but it didn't mention that. It wasn't important, I suppose they thought—if they even thought about it."
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The rain rolled down McLachlan's white face. There was a strained, blank look about it now which made Butler uneasy. For the first time he found himself measuring the distance between them. It was no more than four paces, but there rose a sharp little outcrop of rock in the middle of it, like the tip of an iceberg thrusting through the turf. He hadn't noticed it before because it hadn't mattered. Only now it seemed to matter.
He shook the rain from his face, stamping his feet and edging to the left of the rock.
The shotgun jerked peremptorily. "Just stand where you are, Colonel. . . And stop talking in riddles."
"Riddles?"
"You didn't see anything. But you saw something. What did you see ?"
"You could be on your way home now. This isn't getting you anywhere."
Again the gun lifted. "What did you see?"
The boy was frightened: for some reason he was scared rigid. That pinched look was unmistakable.
"What did you see?"
And the fear was catching. To be at the end of a gun held by a frightened boy wasn't what he had expected.
"I saw the reason why your man set fire to Eden Hall," Butler growled. "I never could understand why he did it— Smith's records weren't important any more—we knew who he was, and he was dead. So killing me didn't make sense."
"But when I saw you playing croquet out there on the lawn, it was then I realised that your files would have been in that attic too—that if I'd known about you then, I'd have looked at them too. Then I really saw you and Smith together for the first time, as a pair, and that was all I needed, really." He paused.
"Just what was there in those records?"
McLachlan looked at him blankly for a moment. Then his lips twisted.
"We never did know. It was the only piece of his life we never properly covered, because the man we sent down originally, back in '68, couldn't find any of those old records. But when Smith was killed we reckoned someone might go down, someone of yours. We couldn't risk you seeing what we hadn't seen."
"What made you think we'd check on Smith?"
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"He said he was going to give himself up. Just himself, not me. He hadn't the guts to be a traitor. But we weren't sure how far he'd gone with it." McLachlan checked himself suddenly. "It doesn't matter now, anyway."
Butler shrugged again, elaborately. "It never did matter. We were on to you from the start. I tell you, boy, you've been lucky."
"Lucky?"