For another moment he was torn between the temptation to stay where he was, to listen to whatever father and son had to say to each other, or to put more distance between himself and them while he had the best chance. But the temptation to stay was a weak one: the boy’s job would have been simply to have warned his father to stay on guard, or out of the village, because his relief
—‘Old Joapey’, presumably—was otherwise engaged. It was unlikely that Kelly ... or, more likely, Audley himself . . . would have confided more to a mere child, however intelligent.
Audley . . . or Kelly ... or both: that was the second and last part of what Colonel Butler wanted to know. And the best way to that was to move now, while he had the opportunity, while the presence of the police would inhibit movement within the village.
He pushed out into the stream again, keeping as close to the reeds as possible, without bothering to use the image intensifier. Either dummy1
the night was less dark now or his own night sight had improved: the loom of the footbridge ahead quickly became the bridge itself, a low structure similar to that beside the ford which he had already negotiated. Beyond it the trees thickened on both sides of the stream and the sun-loving reeds ended. The sky above him became patches of blue-black against a tracery of interlocking branches as he approached the planned landfall.
Everything was all right now: he was in the right place at just about the right time. He had been careless, but he had also been lucky, and the one cancelled out the other to leave him feeling slightly ridiculous. This was England, not the Other Side—and this was the altogether ridiculous River Addle, a tributary of the negligible River Avon (which was confusingly just one of the many English River Avons), not of the Elbe or the Oder or the Danube or the Vistula . . . And that had been Benje’s Dad smoking on the bank back there, not some double-trusted Communist border guard armed with the latest lethal technology and keen to try it out on anyone crossing his line from either side of it.
Ridiculous indeed!
There was an area of not-quite-darkness just ahead, beneath a break in the canopy of leaves, where the spring floods had undercut the bank to create an overhang. That would be a good place to moor the log after he had swopped the wet-suit for its contents, where if it was seen it would be thought to have snagged itself naturally among the exposed tree-roots.
He hauled in the line, bringing the log to his landing place, and eased himself silently on to the bank. For a moment nothing dummy1
stirred, then suddenly a bird squawked in panic just above his head and flapped noisily from its roost, away down the course of the stream, to find some safer refuge.
He hugged the ground, waiting for silence to gather round him again, listening to it thicken until all he could hear came from far away: among the distant night noises he could even distinguish the faint hum of a vehicle on the main road on the ridge, two or three kilometres in a straight line across country from the valley.
Perhaps not quite ridiculous: perhaps practice of a sort . . . or, if not practice, at least a reminder of the risks and discomforts which his successors in the field must endure on his orders—successors who could not depend on luck cancelling carelessness.
Well ... the silence around him was absolute again, and the fox was in the fold undetected, with a job to do ... so whether that job was ridiculous, or a little gentle practice, or a timely reminder of harsher realities ... all of that hardly mattered.
He sighed, and lifted the log out of the water on to dry land, feeling along it in the dark for the concealed catches which opened it.
Out of the wet-suit, and dry, and properly dressed again like an innocent tourist—an innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer—he felt much better.
Of course, he was still an intruder, and if challenged and identified he had only his story of an evening walk on the downland which had been overtaken by darkness and had ended with his becoming hopelessly lost. Even as he rehearsed it to himself while crossing dummy1
the Roman villa field from the stream, it sounded thin and unconvincing to him. But what could they do but believe him?
And, anyway, thin and unconvincing or not, it was better than being caught in a wet-suit: a stranger in slightly crumpled slacks and wind-cheater might or might not be up to no good. But a stranger abroad in a wet-suit after dark could only be either a lunatic or a villain.
But . . . beneath what could they do? that other question still plagued him, as it plagued Colonel Butler: What was Audley doing?
It was extraordinary that the inhabitants of a peaceful English village should conspire together to revenge themselves on a terrorist. And yet, supposing that they had found some way of luring the killer to them, it was not unbelievable.
Even Colonel Butler had admitted that: “We don’t have the death penalty, Captain Schneider— every time it comes up in Parliament on a free vote it’s thrown out. But if you put it to a referendum . . .
which God forbid! . . . we’d have it back— and probably public executions as well. What they’d say is . . . killing children and coppers on the beat. . . ‘String ’em up‘. And rapists who kill, and traitors, and terrorists— ’ Hanging’s too good for them‘, they’d say
— the majority would . . . terrorists— and particularly terrorists with bombs ...”
He could see the churchyard wall ahead, and the stile which he had crossed and recrossed a few hours earlier.
The age of direct action: The Greens and Ban the Bomb, Ban Nuclear Power, Ban War itself. . . And here they had, if not the dummy1
Greens, something like them in England—CND and other peace movements . . . and Greenpeace, and all the animal-lovers, who raided the laboratories and disrupted the hunting of animals.
Hunting humans, now—maybe that wasn’t so wicked!
He climbed the stile, avoiding the gravel path in preference for the noiseless grass between the gravestones.
Colonel Butler: “They’ve got longer memories in the country . . .
Not that they needed them for the Old General. He was something rather special, so it seems— something out of the past, just as Duntisbury Chase and Duntisbury Royal are also out of the past, and rather special. . . I think we have to accept that they conceive they have a duty— that they loved him and that therefore they have the obligation and the right to avenge him, Captain.”
That was the motive-power behind direct action, and what made it so dangerous: it had the powerful fuels of love and duty and self-righteousness in the engine-room, which gave ordinary decent men and women the resolution to act and to endure.
He could see the tall cross of the War Memorial ahead of him now, between two of the ancient yew-trees which the English habitually planted in their churchyards—
The question was not where the true power came from— here, in this churchyard, approaching that cross, which was the symbol of the Saviour of both the English and the Germans in their last hour, commemorating the fallen on both sides— which had been Papa’s cross and Mother’s cross simultaneously . . . the question was who was on the bridge here, at the controls, in the driving seat, dummy1
directing that power to what ends?
He came to the churchyard’s wicket-gate, close by the memorial and with the loom of the Eight Bells on his left. There was a single light in the public house, but in a dormer window in the roof, not at ground level; yet there was no police car in the car park—there were no cars at all... And Colonel Butler had promised that the police would stay in the village, prowling around, until after midnight.