that will save us all time . . . and it may even save you from a certain amount of worry and embarrassment, according to how accurate the print-out from your Wiesbaden computer has been.
Right, Captain?”
Right, Captain? Audley was a specialist—and very nearly an exclusive specialist, too—on Soviet intentions. And that had been worrying—no question about that! But ... so where had the Kommissar got it wrong? That was worrying, too.
But he still had to go on, jumping some of his clever assumptions which had maybe not been so clever.
“A reconnaissance, Captain.” Butler exercised the senior officer’s prerogative of mercy. “We’ll come back to Audley later ... A reconnaissance, you were saying?”
The correct response to mercy, when there was no other alternative, was confession.
“You are quite right. There is something wrong with Duntisbury Chase.” The pressure on him suddenly crystallised all Benedikt’s dummy1
impressions. “I’ve never been in a place like it—not even on the other side.” The crystallisation left him with an extraordinary and frightening near-certainty which up until this moment had been a subjective theory he would only have dared to advance tentatively.
Even . . . even though he believed it himself, now, as all the pieces of it slotted into the places which had been made to fit them, it seemed quite outrageous for a stretch of peaceful English countryside.
“Trust Audley.” Chief Inspector Andrew nodded at Colonel Butler.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Ssh!” Colonel Butler raised his hand and nodded encouragingly at Benedikt. “Tell us, Captain. And don’t be put off just because of anything I’ve said.”
That was the final incentive Benedikt needed.
“If you wanted me to look at them, I thought they might want to look at me, Colonel. So I prepared my belongings for them.”
“Fair enough.”
“They opened the car—and they opened all my baggage. They went through everything.”
Andrew frowned. “But you came straight here—?”
“I’m in a multi-storey car-park. And it only took a minute to check, Chief Inspector. Because I set it up to be checked—and it had been searched—”
Butler gestured to stop him. “Professionally?”
This time Benedikt frowned. “They did not leave obvious traces—
there were no marks on the locks, or anything crude . . . But they dummy1
had plenty of time, while I was going round the Chase—”
“Not Audley.” Colonel Butler nodded to Andrew, then came back to Benedikt. “Opening things up delicately is not one of his skills—
it’s a skill he has always been at pains not to acquire. So he had someone else with him who could do it, that’s all.”
Benedikt stared at him. If it had not been Audley ... it had never occurred to him that it had not been Audley. But . . . Rebecca Maxwell-Smith would not possess that sort of expertise, and neither Old Cecil nor young Bobby fitted the tfill, any better than did the friendly landlord of the Eight Bells, or his nubile assistant—
“What else?” The Colonel prodded him.
What else, indeed!
Yet it still required an effort. “There are no signs to Duntisbury Royal, Colonel. Would you believe that?”
“Signs?”
“Signposts. . . . On the main road there are many little side-roads, all with signs naming villages—even naming farms. But there is no sign ‘Duntisbury Royal’ on the signpost on the main road.”
“So how did you get there?”
“I asked the way. There is a petrol-station near the turning— it is the only such place for several miles, and therefore the obvious place at which to inquire.” Benedikt paused. “But later on, when I returned, I examined the signpost. There was an arm on the post, but it has been cut off with a wood-saw.”
Butler nodded slowly. “So you asked the way.”
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“So I asked the way. So I was expected.”
“Expected?”
“Along the way, perhaps ten minutes, I was delayed by a farm tractor, manoeuvring on to the road a trailer. And behind me there came a Land Rover, boxing me in.” He paused again.
“You mean, the petrol-station attendant warned them that you were coming?” Butler cocked his head. “Why should he do that?”
“So that I could be examined . . . scrutinised.”
“By whom?”
“There were two men in the Land Rover. Their windscreen was so dirty I could not make them out, but they could have studied me easily enough. But also by David Audley, certainly.”
“Audley was there?”
“He arrived there. And he came up to the car to look at me closely
—to hear me speak, perhaps.”
Chief Inspector Andrew shook his head. “But you said you met him ... at the Roman place?”
“I was introduced to him there. I was directed to him there, the second time. But the first time ... we were not introduced.”
“So he wanted to know more about you?”
“By then he knew more about me, I think. At the public house I explained why I had come to Duntisbury Royal. But he wanted to know more than that—yes.”
Colonel Butler rubbed his chin, and in the silence of the little stone cell Benedikt could hear the slight rasping sound of the blunt dummy1
fingers on the invisible stubble.
“And what did he make of you, Captain Schneider? You said you made no mistakes?”
“I do not believe I did. Also, at least he would not have taken me for a soldier, Colonel. And if he telephones the embassy they will tell him about Dr Wiesehöfer—they will confirm what I told him.
Major Herzner will have seen to that.”
The two men exchanged glances.
“He has phoned the embassy?” Benedikt looked from one to the other, and the Colonel nodded to the Special Branch man.
“Somebody phoned the embassy.” Andrew nodded. “Not from there—we’re monitoring all the calls from Duntisbury Royal. And not Audley either.” He studied Benedikt for a moment. “What did you say Herr—Dr—Wiesehöfer did for a living?”
“I said he was a civil servant, Chief Inspector.”
“And what does he do?”
“He is a civil servant.” They would know, of course. “He is a procurement advisor on the NATO standardisation committee.”
Andrew half-smiled. “Yes . . . well, it was from the export director of Anglo-American Electronics, the call was. They specialise in micro-systems for missiles for NATO.”
But why the half-smile? “So it was a genuine call?”
Chief Inspector Andrew shrugged. “Could be.”
“The trouble with David Audley ... is that he knows a lot of people, Captain,” said Butler.
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“Like the managing director of AAE, for one,” said Andrew. “So, if he was going to check up on you, this is exactly the way he might do it—on the old boy network. But there’s no way we can check up on that without spooking him, because the MD there owes him a big favour, and we can’t rely on patriotism being thicker than gratitude in his case, because he’s an American.”
The contradictions of the situation were beginning to confuse Benedikt. In Germany the managing director of a company specialising in NATO missile-systems would be no problem, he would know where his duty lay, and his best interests too. But then in Germany, when Colonel Butler’s opposite number trusted a senior officer to the extent that Colonel Butler trusted Dr David Audley, there would have been no problem to resolve in the first place. It was all very confusing.
Butler had stopped stroking his chin. “Why would he not take you for a soldier?”
That, at least, was easy. He extracted the spectacle-case from his pocket, and the spectacles from the case.
“Soldiers are not half-blind.” He perched the appalling things on his nose. His eyes hurt and the faces of the two men swam in an opaque sea, and he took the spectacles off quickly. “I use them with contact lenses—I became used to them several years ago—”
He smiled at Colonel Butler, remembering Sonnenstrand “—in Bulgaria. With contact lenses, it is a matter of growing accustomed to them. Then the glasses by themselves are no problem. Also, with contact lenses and the necessary preparations which go with them, no one questions that I should have all that in my baggage too dummy1
—they cannot know that the lenses correct the glasses, not the eye-sight, you see.”
“Huh!” Colonel Butler sniffed. “A gimmick.”
“But a convincing one, sir. And not inappropriate for a student of Roman roads.”
Butler remained unconvinced. “But Audley’s no fool. And I didn’t expect him to surface so quickly. I was expecting him to keep in the background.” He shook his head. “So I wouldn’t bet on it—and that gives us less time, I’m afraid . . . Always supposing that we have any time.”
“The Roman roads weren’t bad, sir,” demurred the Chief Inspector.
“He can hardly have been expecting that, for God’s sake! Not in the time we had—”
“Huh!” This time it was more like a growl. “He once passed me off as an expert on Roman fortification—or on Byzantine fortification, anyway, which is a damn sight more obscure than Roman roads—
and in a damn sight less time, too!” He grimaced reminiscently.
“But you couldn’t know that—I doubt whether even Captain Schneider’s computer in Wiesbaden knows it!”
The Colonel was plainly worried about his unimpeachably reliable subordinate, notwithstanding that loyalty-to-the-death. And although that added to Benedikt’s confusion, so far as that was possible, it also fed his instinctive liking for the man: Colonel Butler was a leader out of the same mould as Papa’s idols.
“I don’t know what he made of me, sir.” He came back to the original question. “But I was not the man he was waiting for—that dummy1
I know.”
“The man?” Colonel Butler forgot his worries. “The man?”
“It could not have been a woman. He would not have come to look at me if I had been the wrong sex.” He stretched what he believed to its limits. “At the worst ... he was not sure of me—that I was not doing what I was actually doing . . . Looking over the place, that is.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I was never alone, sir. From the moment I entered the Chase, there was always someone, I think, who was watching me.” He struggled with the concept. “At the road-block . . . and in the public house . . . But there was a man on the hillside—on the ridge—
before that. . . And in the village, when I walked round it, there was this woman on a bicycle who seemed to follow us—”
“Us?”
Benedikt smiled. “There were these two little boys I met, on their racing bicycles—they showed me round . . . Before lunch they took me to the Roman villa, and afterwards they led me through the village, to the footpath which leads to the Duntisbury Rings—”
Benje had been dismissive: “She’s just an old nosey-parker— you don’t want to take any notice of her.”
She had been tall and thin, riding a tall and thin bicycle unbalanced by an immense wicker basket resting on her front mudguard. But she had been there behind them, off and on, until the second man had appeared.
“—and after her there was another man—”