He shook his head. If there was nothing left to show that the wires had been deliberately brought down, should he invent evidence to keep Audley happy? It had been what he had originally intended, after all, before the possible truth of it had dawned on him. Yet Audley had taken little convincing; it was almost as though he'd welcomed the idea, despite his previous intransigence. Perhaps deep down he knew that he wasn't quite big enough to turn Llewelyn away.
Or perhaps it was simply that the logic of Roskill's solution made dummy2
such crude proof unnecessary. It was there in the events themselves: every step of the car theft and booby-trapping had been marked by the same contradictory cleverness and stupidity.
But the cleverness and the stupidity had both been carefully calculated to lead directly to the removal of the fatal bug by an expert – and by one expert in particular.
The Jenkins Gambit, Audley had called it: the best way to kill a food taster is by poisoning his master's dish — it looks like an occupational hazard!
And it had so very nearly worked, too. With someone as important as Llewelyn menaced, Jenkins was almost certain to be overlooked. The assassins could not reasonably have expected anyone like Roskill, with a personal commitment to sharpen his perception, to appear on the scene – and even he had only stumbled on the more likely truth by accident.
The only real flaw in their planning was the telephone wire: the coincidence that had alerted Roskill. They should have waited until Jenkins came on duty by normal routine — unless for some reason they were unable to wait, in which case it was not a flaw, but a calculated risk...
At least finding the place had been easy enough. Although the repair men had worked on the other side of the hedge their vehicles had chewed up the roadside verge, deeply rutting the debris of the previous summer. He had had no difficulty spotting it on his early morning reconnaissance drive along the road, in the half-light.
The tree itself, contrary to Butler's report, had not come down – it merely leaned drunkenly away from the road, ten degrees out of dummy2
true. The damage had been done by a huge dead limb which appeared to have snapped off two-thirds of the way up. Falling in the field it had brought down Maitland's wires and conveniently left the main cable intact.
Roskill squelched his way over the ruined verge. The elm had grown up on the far side of a deep roadside ditch; with its one-sided root system – he could see the stumps of roots which had been severed when the ditch had last been cleaned out – it was hardly surprising that it had started to fall away from the road.
Elms, he remembered, were notoriously unstable at the best of times.
He peered up at the new scar high up on the trunk where the limb had been ripped away. There were no signs of saw marks, nor any tell-tale sawdust scattering at the base either. It looked depressingly like a natural break, the result of the extra pressure when the tree canted over.
Not for the first time he felt a touch of doubt chilling his beautiful theory. It would be damned embarrassing if he was forced to double-cross Audley into making a fool of Llewelyn. Worse, if Jenkins wasn't the target it was Audley who would be made to look the fool, and Audley would be a nasty enemy to make in the department.
He launched himself clumsily across the ditch, throwing his weight forward and embracing the elm as the soft earth crumbled under him.
The grass on the other side of the hedge was also torn and trampled dummy2
and sprinkled with legitimate sawdust, where the fallen limb had been cut up into manageable sections and stacked. It was good burning wood, too, dead but not rotten.
Dead, but not rotten: there was something maybe not quite right about that. He ran his eye up the trunk again: it was odd how the great branch hadn't fallen in a line with the tree itself – yet if it had done so it would almost certainly have missed Maitland's wires. As it was it had peeled off towards the left, almost as though it had been ... pulled.
Pulled! He kicked himself mentally for missing the simplest method of alclass="underline" hitch a cable to the dead branch and pull obliquely.
It was not only the obvious way but virtually the only way, and he'd been a monumental idiot not to see it at once.
And yet it would take immense strength to do it – not only bringing down the branch, but also very nearly the tree itself. It would take more than manpower to do that.
He looked up at the elm again, then down to the torn turf, trying to gauge the likely direction from which the pulling had been done. It had to be out in the field to the left of the wires.
He moved carefully away from the hedge, searching the ground intently. It had been dry on that night, and for some days before, but this land was low lying. Further out in the field there were tussocks of coarse marsh grass. It would never be less than damp here.
And there they were!
Hardly more than twenty yards from the elm, and somewhat closer dummy2
to the hedge than he had expected, were four symmetrical bruises in the grass where the wheels had spun for a moment before winning their tug-of-war with the branch.
Roskill's pulse beat with excitement: four tyre marks made the evidence conclusive. The act of dragging a heavy object on the ground would have produced deeper rear wheel marks and shallower front ones, even if the vehicle was four-wheel drive. But the downward pull had equalised the forces at work — another few yards, indeed, and it would have been the front tyres which would have dug deeper into the ground. These marks were exactly those which a Land-Rover would make in the act of sabotaging the line, unremarkable in themselves but irrefutable evidence in context.
He experienced a curious mixture of gratification and anger. His logic – and Audley's confidence – was vindicated by this tattered piece of low-grade pasture. Here Maitland had been deliberately cut off, so that Jenkins should keep the appointment.
Somebody knew too bloody much about the technical section, that was certain. And somebody knew too much about Llewelyn's movements.
Roskill felt for the camera in his webbing haversack. And somebody, he thought grimly, had come unstuck, nevertheless.
III
AUDLEY WAS STANDING on the pavement in Grosvenor dummy2
Gardens, ten yards from its junction with Buckingham Palace Road, which was precisely where he had said he would be, to the yard.
In fact, thought Roskill, he looked rather like a solitary, oversized waxwork which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud's and then abandoned to become a pedestrian obstacle: he stood unmoving, engrossed in a dull-looking, stiff-covered mag;azine, oblivious of the passers-by who eddied round him and of the traffic which accelerated past his nose.
Even when Roskill slid the Triumph alongside the kerb beside him he did not move at once. And nor, when he did move, did he bother to verify that it was Roskill. He methodically closed the magazine, turning down the page – so much Roskill could see from the driver's seat – and simply got straight into the car, without a word.
Roskill engaged the gears. 'Well, we were right,' he said.
Audley grunted and nodded. 'You mean you were right. I was reasonably sure you would be, whether you found anything or not.
But I'm glad to hear it; it's always nicer to be certain.'
He subsided into silence and it occurred to Roskill that he wasn't going to ask for details. That might indeed be proof of a touching confidence, but now seemed far more likely to indicate that Audley was trying to forget how very nearly he had missed the chance of making a laughing-stock of his enemy.