— you knew Jerry was going to hit you with his E-boats, that last time - because you'd got the Ultra decode - Liza, my dear! Off to bed? Just trying to get a straight answer from your father - eh, Loftus?'
And Father had said, without looking at her, as though she didn't exist, 'My dear Birkenshawe —
the Navy, unlike the Army, isn't hired to run away. It's hired to fight -Goodnight, Elizabeth - '
'Turn right, Mr Richardson. I have absolutely no desire to visit the underground car park at Avignon. So let's go to St Servan.'
Richardson drove, as he was told: signalled, slowed, drove… slowed again, signalled again, and finally accelerated without another word, letting his silence pronounce his disapproval.
Elizabeth stared out of the window, trying to see what she found herself looking at. She had always wanted to visit Provence: it was one of those places every schoolteacher ought to know, the land of van Gogh and Cezanne, and Madame de Sevigne, and Daudet and his mill, and Tartarin de Tarascon, and St Louis at Aigues-Mortes, and above all the monumental relics of the Romans. But in Father's time she had never travelled anywhere, and now she couldn't see anything at all - just a rich foreign countryside like a great busy market garden full of fiercely growing things glimpsed in gaps in cypress hedges and lattices of bamboo.
Why was nothing ever as it ought to be, not even freedom and power and adventure?
'Hah-hmm…' Audley cleared his throat, as though to attract her attention. 'Quite right, Elizabeth. For the record.'
She looked at him in surprise. 'For the record?'
He smiled. 'You didn't ask me for advice. You did your own thing. But, for the record, I am advising you nevertheless… to go on to St Servan.' He tapped Richardson on the shoulder, dummy2
somewhat urgently. 'Got that, Peter Richardson? " Dr Audley insisted - " - got that?'
'Uh-huh.' They burst out of a shadowy avenue of cypresses into open country at last, with hills ahead, and other hills behind misting into a heat haze. '"There is the enemy - there are the guns": if Captain Nolan comes back from the Valley of Death he will dutifully recall what Lord Lucan said to Lord Cardigan. Just so he comes back all in one piece is all he cares about now. But he will dutifully and gratefully recall every last word and syllable afterwards. If there is an afterwards.'
Elizabeth still looked at Audley, trying hard not to feel affection for him. Because sentiment was always dangerous in this game, and with someone as devious as David it might well be dangerously misplaced, too. 'Why, David?'
'I was going to ask you the same question, my dear."
Why?'
'I asked first.'
'But you're in charge. I am but a soldier-of-the-line -… Or, in these parts, a time-expired legionary cheated in his discharge.'
'Then, if I'm in charge, I can pull rank on you, David.'
Another smile. 'And I recruited you, didn't I? So I have no one else to blame, except myself?' He also chuckled. 'Fair enough!'
It wasn't fair enough: if they had played dirty with her, they'd played even dirtier with him. But it was a dirty game, and no one had forced him to play it. And she had other, dirtier doubts about him, anyway.
'I'm too old for this sort of thing. But, more than that - much more than that - I'm too busy: I have much more urgent and important things to do, than worry about some allegedly horrendous mistake I made, years ago - That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools -
'So now I must stop what I ought to be doing, and manoeuvre to protect my back from my enemies on my own side. And I can't blame them, that's the trouble. Because, in their shoes I might be doing just the same thing. Because there is something bloody queer about all this - I know that, if I know nothing else.'
dummy2
Audley fell silent and Peter Richardson drove furiously. And the orchards and almond-groves had fallen behind them: now there were vineyards, immaculately cultivated, with distant ruined castles on the low hills on either side of them. 'What we're doing, Elizabeth, is running out of time. Because this whole affair revolves around time, I suspect. Because Parker didn't need to call on Haddock Thomas the way he did - he could have taken his time to set up that meeting. And why did he go over that cliff at the Pointe du Hoc? They could have taken him out any time - just as they could have taken out Haddock Thomas.'
'And Major Turnbull?'
'Turnbull?' The car swerved slightly. 'What's with old Brian at the moment? I heard Jack Butler had acquired him after he'd lost his cover. Is he in on this?'
'Mmm… ?' Audley pretended not to have heard the question properly. 'What about him?
Brian alias Turnbull?'
'Nothing. Difficult old sod.' Richardson shook his head. 'Remember me to him, though.
And… just tell him it wasn't my fault, that business about his cover. But if he'd stayed where he was he'd have been on borrowed time - tell him that.'
Thoughts jostled Elizabeth's mind, relevant and irrelevant. She had the other half of his name now, which she had never known, or even needed to know: the unimportant (and quite inappropriate) half. Brian -
'I'll do that. If I see him.' What Richardson didn't need to know Audley wisely didn't tell him. 'You wanted to know, Elizabeth - why, was it?'
If someone, somewhere, had wanted Major Turnbull dead, for whatever reason, then it would have been no problem putting a contract out on him: that didn't prove anything more than Richardson had already done, with that message of his. The fact of Fordingwell
- the terminal event - was less important than its timing; which was what Audley had been saying.
'We have to go on, Elizabeth, because we don't have any choice in the matter. That's all.'
Audley leaned forward. 'Would that be Bomb Disposal logic, from your Royal Engineers days, Captain Richardson?'
'Uh-huh.' Richardson held the wheel tightly, letting the car drive itself along a Roman-straight road towards the hilltop ahead, which boasted a tricolore above its ruined tower.
'But there were such things as anti-handling devices even in our day, designed to blow us up. So we didn't just hit it with a hammer because it wasn't actually ticking.' He half-turned towards Audley. 'And you seem to think your bomb is still ticking, if I heard you dummy2
correctly?'
'My bomb?' Audley sniffed, and turned to Elizabeth. 'There speaks a peace-time bomb disposal officer, my dear. When my old chemistry master was a bomb disposal officer in London in 1941 he always had half-a-dozen bombs - and a couple of land-mines - on the go, in the Blitz. He always used to say that it wasn't a question of when he'd be blown up, so much as where. In fact, the last time he came back he got the Head to set the sixth-form scholarship class a variation on the old Would you save the baby or the Elgin Marbles?
question: Would you save a row of houses in the East End or the local sewage works? And, I tell you, that really stretched us. Because we'd never seen a sewage works, let alone an East End house.'
'So what was his answer?' Richardson fell into the trap.
'He never got round to telling us.' Having caught his man, Audley returned happily to Elizabeth. 'If I'm wrong about Haddock, it'll take you months to get any sort of lead, And if I'm not wrong it'll take you forever. But in the meanwhile I want to get back to a bomb of my own at Cheltenham, which could go up any minute. So let's hit this one with a bloody hammer… And if it goes off in our faces - if he laughs at us, and tells us that there isn't one damn thing we can do now… because there isn't one damn thing we can do - except maybe I can resign, and you can get a feather in your cap, if you want to wear a feather… if he laughs at us, that'll be something better than nothing.'