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—”
dummy1
The man with the gun couched under his arm, on the skyline.
“That’s Old Levi— from the Almshouses. He lives on boiled sausages, Mum says— and boiled rabbits, when he can bag one,
‘cause there’re not many of them around . . . An’ he sleeps in his gumboots, Mum says . . . Because when they took him into the cottage hospital, when he had ‘flu, they had to cut them off his feet, to get him into bed—yrrrch!”
But Old Levi—(who didn’t look particularly old, from the way he kept up with them; but everyone who wasn’t obviously young was old to Benje and Darren) but Old Levi had paced them, on the skyline and off it, all the way from Duntisbury Rings to Caesar’s Camp, and then down along the possible terrace of the Roman agger into the valley, to the sun-dappled pools where the stream idled between the trees—
Another thought struck him, which dove-tailed beautifully with everything else he had said, like the good work of a master carpenter slotting together, yet much more frightening, and much more humiliatingly—
“What’s the matter?” It was the Chief Inspector who had read his face more quickly.
The little boys! thought Benedikt. The little clever boys, with their clever and insistent questions—?
But he had clued himself to the answer, with his own remembrance of that village near Leipzig two years ago, when because of his stupidity the Russians and the East Germans had both been close behind him—inescapably close—with the women carrying their dummy1
sheets off the line, down by another stream, and the children coming back from school, staring at him with huge eyes until the women had sent them about their business as he had slipped away into the trees—
All he had to do was to reverse the situation—he had said as much himself: I’ve never been in a place like it, not even on the other side
— to become an enemy, not a friend!
But here in England—?
Here in England, too! Yes!
He looked at Chief Inspector Andrew, then at Colonel Butler. “I think I have been stupid, you know.”
They both waited for the end-product of that conclusion.
“It is not that I have given anything away. Perhaps quite the contrary . . . But I have nevertheless been stupid.”
Suddenly he saw the little girl beside the water-splash, sitting on the footbridge in her grubby dress, and then ducking behind the phone-box. And then into it—
“Yes . . . these two small boys, who accompanied me . . . not so little, but not big boys . . .”
“Little boys?” Butler regarded him incredulously.
“They attached themselves to me.” There had been no escape from them then, and there was no escape from them now. “I...I have experience with boys. I have nephews . . . and I help to run a youth club for the church, in the place where I live, when I am there.”
The need for honesty outweighed the burden of his humiliation: in a de-briefing honesty was essential, anything less than the truth dummy1
mediated against security. “I thought to use them—to ask questions which I could not so easily ask their elders.”
“Yes?” The Special Branch man was there.
“I thought I was cultivating them. But now I’m not sure that it wasn’t the other way round—that they were questioning me . . .
And that they were watching me more closely than their elders could have done—that the woman, and the second man . . . they were the back-up, watching over the boys, rather than watching me.”
“Yeah—y eah!!” Chief Inspector Andrew at least didn’t find it outrageous. “I’ve seen little kids look out for their elder brothers, on a job . . . Nothing like this, of course. But if you’ve got a bright kid . . .” He nodded at Butler.
“God bless my soul!” The Colonel took a moment to adjust to the idea. “Children?”
“These were clever children, sir.” Benedikt himself still couldn’t quite accept the little girl at the water-splash. “They were at... is it