didn't put the question properly. Can I trust you to trust me?'
Faith made a sour face. 'That's a hard one, isn't it! And a dirty one, too.'
'I don't see why it should be. You'd give me answers on much more difficult questions. You'd tell me that the Americans were wrong in Vietnam. You're sure that Porton is as wicked as Aldermaston.
You think moon rockets ought to be beaten into ploughshares. But it doesn't matter, because I'm not putting the question to you–I have to put it to myself.'
He took the cutlery from her and continued the work.
'Who cut my lawn today?'
She shook her head in disbelief. 'What an odd person you are! I cut your lawn for you. When Mrs Clark came with your groceries this morning and found you gone she practically ordered me to do it.
She even showed me how to start the mower. What's that got to do with trusting me?'
'Mrs Clark is a good judge of character. If she trusts you with the mower and the lawn, then perhaps I can trust you in other matters.
Are you willing to find out exactly what your father did, for better or worse?'
'I want to. And I can't see the harm in that.'
'There could be more to it than that. I told you last night that your father took something. There's a Russian who knows what it was.
And he wants it so badly that he's willing to ask us to help him find it. At least, that's what we think he's going to ask us.'
'Is he a good man or a bad man?'
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'He's a very important man.'
Faith shivered. 'If good and bad aren't words that mean anything to you, then you'd better not trust me. Because I'd be an idiot to trust you.'
Audley caught himself on the very brink of accusing her of naivete. Of course she was naive–and so was he to expect anything else. Again, too, that unforgivable crime: if he was to use her he had to persuade her first.
'We just don't know about him, except that he has great power and influence in his own country. And that's why we've got to find out what it is and why it's so important to him. We'd like him for a friend, but we can't trust him. You must see that!'
'It always comes back to trusting people. You never trust them and they never trust you! It's just a game to you!'
'Trust them!' He felt the anger he couldn't stifle tighten his throat.
'Be like Dubcek? Or like Nagy and Maleter? And Jan Masaryk?
Christ, woman, we don't have the right to trust them.'
He could see the pit ahead of him, but he was no longer able to avoid it. He didn't even want to avoid it now, anyway.
'Of course it's a game. And if everyone played it sensibly we'd be a damn sight better off. It's the people who try to turn the pie-faced noble sentiments and the crude doctrinaire slogans into practice who start the shooting. So you'd better pack up your cosy scruples and your moral dilemmas and take them back to school with you, Miss Jones. They'll look better on a blackboard.'
He paused for breath, and despised himself. There was a flush on dummy4
her cheeks, the colour spreading as though he had hit her.
Shopkeepers and schoolteachers were easy game. And tempting game, too, after the Stockers and Joneses, who could always keep him in his place.
'I'm sorry, Miss Jones. None of that was fair. And you could be right,' he said dully. 'But I do care about the game I play–or used to play. In fact, I think I've been landed with your father because I cared too much about it: I hated to see the Middle East turned into a Tom Tiddler's ground–mostly by your friends the Russians, but by us and the Americans too. I've no right to take it out on you, though.'
She turned, and he thought for a moment that she was simply going to leave the room. But instead she reached for a chair and settled astride it, resting her chin on the back.
'What do you want me to do, then?' she said.
He regarded her with surprise. She had not seemed the sort of person to submit to bullying.
'You mean that you're still willing to help me?'
'More than ever now, David. I don't pretend to understand you. Or maybe, it's just that I don't understand what makes someone like you do this sort of thing. But I somehow don't think you'd commit yourself to what was wrong. And I'm sorry I said it was just a game. That was–well, it was far worse than what you said.'
No olive branch could be more fairly offered.
'Let's eat first,' he said, absurdly relieved that she was not going to pack her bags.
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As they ate she chattered unselfconsciously about her day — a strange day among strangers in a strange house. It was curious they had all accepted her, the postman, the Co-op milkman and Mrs Clark. Did people take it for granted now that bachelors would have girls around the house from time to time, or was it that she was unselfconscious? Audley found it soothing except that his first false impression of her haughtiness outside Asham churchyard niggled at his sense of contentment. He wasn't usually so far wide of the mark.
There was a dreamlike quality about the meal. It wasn't just that she was so different from Liz–though without her glasses she was probably as pretty, if considerably less well endowed physically. It was rather that behind this normality, behind the milkman's attempt to sell her double cream and Mrs Clark's assumption of her role as Liz's long-delayed successor, was the cold reality.
They were not friends, or even chance acquaintances: they were links in a chain of events going back half a lifetime, joined by a man long dead–and now by a man newly dead. The tranquillity of small talk and washing up on the draining board was false.
Somewhere out there in the growing darkness skilled men were still taking the Dakota to bits. An hour away Morrison was on a slab and Roskill would be waiting for the police surgeon's report; across the Channel Butler was hunting the Belgian who had been scared out of his wits all those years ago. And beyond all of them was Panin.
They were the real world. This was a gentle illusion.
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In the end it was the telephone bell which shattered that illusion.
He caught Faith's eye on him as he sat willing it to stop, and was startled by the hint of understanding. He shook his head to dispel the idea. Dreams could not be shared so easily. She had more reason to be nervous about any step towards the truth, however much she desired to know it.
The calm, well-bred and rather bored voice on the phone finally snapped him out of his introspection. Dr Audley wished for particulars of G Tower . . .
'A bomb-proof anti-aircraft complex in Berlin, sir. They started building it in the winter of '41. In the Zoological Gardens — south of the Tiergarten, across the Landwehr Canal. Just beside the zoo's aviaries–nice piece of Teutonic town planning.'
A flak tower. He remembered a monster towering above the ruins of Hamburg in 1948.
'Much bigger than that one, sir. More like a fortress than a flak tower. Every mod con–internal power generators, water supplies, the lot. . .
'Main battery on the roof–eight heavy guns and four light batteries.
Under them the garrison quarters, with ammunition hoists. Then a military hospital, fully equipped, staff of 60. Under that the cream of the Staatliche Museum collections, safe as the Bank of England.
And then two floors of air raid shelters, with room for 15,000–
though they got twice as many in towards the end. Plus 2,000 dead and wounded. It was safe right up to the end–eight-foot of reinforced concrete and steel shutters–but not very pleasant.'
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Audley tried to envisage 30,000 panic-stricken civilians crammed into a concrete box with Russian shells and bombs smashing against its sides.
'But quite safe, as I said. It's even thought that Goebbels planned at one time to direct the defence from there–there was an emergency broadcasting station on the ground floor, and the main communications centre–L Tower, that was–was just nearby. But in the end he stayed at the other end of the Tiergarten.