“Splendid view you have.”
George said, “Oh, yes, it is nice, isn’t it? We’re a bit isolated here, but there are compensations, like the view. I don’t suppose much has changed since Henry the Fifth rolled up through these parts.”
Walker looked uncomprehending. George waved a hand to the north.
“Agincourt’s only about eighty miles from here. Though that was October, and I don’t imagine it was much fun for an archer on foot, mud up to his shins, freezing rain.”
Walker nodded and sipped his Calvados.
“Once more unto the breach and all that,” he said.
George shook his head. “That was Harfleur,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder towards the south, “back that way. Although you’ve got the right campaign.”
Walker smiled. “I never was much of a one for history. Ancient history, that is. More recent history, that interests me a lot more.”
George tilted his head on one side and eyed him, like a bird.
“You’re getting to it, aren’t you? Why you’re here. All that.”
“All that,” said Walker. “Yes, I’m getting to it. I have to, George.”
“All right. I’ll ask the question. Why are you here?”
Walker sipped again at his Calvados, and squinted into the sunlit landscape. “How long has it been? Since you retired, I mean.”
“About a year,” George said.
“And you announced your intention of retiring six months before that.”
“Yes.”
“You see, it was funny, that, we all thought it was funny. Man like you, in the prime of life, only what, fifty-five? Suddenly upping and going like that. We all thought it was funny. Gordon and I did, anyway. You remember Gordon, the Financial Director? Of course you do. He was your boss, after all. We had quite a few chats about you. We didn’t mention it to the other members of the Board, of course, and still less to the Chairman. Poor old Eddie lives in another world anyway.”
“You and Gordon,” said George, nodding.
“Just we two. And Gordon went off very, very quietly and started squirrelling, very, very delicately, not upsetting or alarming anybody, you understand, just having a little poke around in things. Usually at night. Played hell with his social life for a bit, I remember.”
George was still nodding. “And what did he find?”
“He found you, George. Or rather, he found you out. I don’t know how he did it, the details were a bit complex for my tiny mind, something to do with cross-invoicing between the subsidiaries, if I have it right. He said it was bloody clever and practically undetectable.”
George smiled. “Not wholly undetectable, apparently.”
“Not quite. Not if someone set out to find it. There was a little slip-up somewhere. You’ll understand, George, I’m not an accountant like you and Gordon.”
“So Gordon worked it out, did he?”
“Yes, he did. Bloody good mind, Gordon. He explained it to me, in simple images, George, because I’m only a simple marketing man, after all. He said if you imagine Ballistic PLC, the holding company, as a great big bucket, and you imagine that great big bucket being surrounded by lots and lots of smaller buckets and all these buckets have different amounts of water in them and water is constantly being passed between the big bucket and the smaller buckets and between some of the smaller buckets themselves, because they’re suppliers and customers some of them, well, with all that water sloshing back and forth no one notices if there’s a tiny little bucket catching some of the sloppings. Because there are bound to be sloppings. And you were there with your tiny little bucket, giving one of the bigger buckets a little jog every so often.”
George laughed. “It’s a bit simplistic, but yes, as an image, it’s not bad.”
“Gordon said to me that according to his figures you’d managed to slop over about two hundred thousand quid.”
“That’s about right,” George said calmly, “near enough two hundred thousand.”
Walker nodded. “What puzzled us at the time was why you did it.”
George Read said nothing at first. He looked out over the countryside.
Then he said, “Ever been to Agincourt? No? We went up there a bit ago. That’s a grim place to be on a morning if the weather’s bad. Horrible. Just this great long field slightly hourglass-shaped; that’s how the French chivalry got theirs. Got funnelled into a confined space, and then the arrows. An English archer could fire eight or ten arrows a minute. Sort of medieval Gatling gun. So at any one time, with two thousand archers, there’d have been about six thousand arrows in the air. And an arrow from a bow with a hundred-pound pull went straight through the armour.”
Walker waited to see where this was going.
“Your archer, he had a club on his belt as well, you see. And one of his jobs when the killing was done was to go out and finish off the wounded. And if he was really lucky and in there among the first, he might come upon a chevalier who would be worth quite a bit of ransom. So even the poor bloody infantry, soaking wet, up to his knees in mud, on fourpence a week could go home worth a fortune. Quite a few did, apparently.”
“The poor bloody infantry,” said Walker, understanding a little.
George turned to him. “Do you know what my pension amounted to after thirty-five bloody years with the company? No. Well, I won’t bother telling you. And I won’t bother telling you what my insurance was going to be worth after a two-year stock-market crash.”
“I see. So you decided to do something about it yourself.”
“Yes. Not very much. Nothing that would hurt anybody. A few pounds here, a few pounds there. Really nothing at all when you consider what the Group turns over in a year.” He smiled. “Nothing to be noticed. Unless you went looking for it really hard.”
Walker nodded again.
George said, “So, I’m supposed to come home and face the music, is that it?”
Walker sat up straight. “Good Lord, no. That’s the last thing we want, George. Dear me, no. Perish the thought. No, we’ve got quite another suggestion to make.”
George looked at him beadily, with his head cocked on one side.
“I think you’d better tell me just what’s going on. Because I suppose something’s going on. Isn’t it?”
Walker shifted in his chair.
“The thing is, George, I’ll be perfectly frank with you; you’re into the Company for a little more than you thought.”
George said, “I don’t understand. Can you make that a bit clearer, please?”
“Well,” Walker said carefully, “after Gordon found out about your — your—”
“Peculation is a good solid word,” said George.
“Right. Jolly good. Peculation. After Gordon found out about it, we had a little think and a little chat. Actually, it was mostly him chatting.”
“He was always ready for a chat, as I remember.”
“Yes. Well, the burden of his chat was, look, we’ve got a chap here who’s busy squirrelling away some of the company’s cash. In normal times, Gordon said, he’d have said good luck to him.”
“But these weren’t normal times?”
“Far from it, old George. Gordon had just taken a frightful bashing on New Tech stocks. And he — he was a Name at Lloyd’s, did you know that?”
George shook his head. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. He’s the sort who would be.”
“Yes. Well, he’d just had the most horrendous call from Lloyd’s, somewhere in the high six figures. Put too fine a point on it, Gordon was up against it. And so was I–I won’t bore you with the details — so he came up with this wheeze.”
“What sort of wheeze?” George asked warily, but with a look that said he knew the wheeze wasn’t going to sound good.