'Probably not, Miss Jones. I think Morrison's heart gave out on them inopportunely–which is perhaps one reason why you had visitors last night!'
Faith digested the sequence of events which had brought her to the priest's hole. Audley could almost hear her mind working, although the dark glasses gave away nothing. He wanted to tell her that it wasn't so; that it was fear and the need for an anodyne, not death, which had thrown them together. But there was nothing he could say.
Finally she spoke: 'Then logically, if they are at all efficient, they should be following us now.'
Audley thought it highly unlikely that anyone was capable of dummy4
following Hugh Roskill's Triumph.
'That's all taken care of,' said Roskill. 'It isn't likely, but we'll be swapping cars on the M1 in due course. And we've got chaps watching over Tierney and Maclean already–we're efficient too, you know, when no one's pulling the purse-strings tight!'
He whistled contentedly through his teeth.
'You know,' he said conversationally to Faith, 'I used to think that with enough manpower to cover all the contingencies, and someone like Dr Audley to do my thinking for me, this job would be easy. Not this job, I mean, but things in general. But now I've got 'em I'm more at sea than ever . . .'
Audley retreated into the plastic folder. He envied Roskill's ability to make easy conversation, interesting yet self-mocking, as much as his driving skill. He knew he was incapable of diverting her with tales of his own modest triumphs and humiliations. He recalled the last bitter session of recriminations with Liz, when she had piled his dullness on top of his seriousness and his inability to talk to her. 'Like a bloody pedantic German professor, with no room for me except in bed and in the kitchen' had been her parting shot, all the more wounding for its element of truth.
He remembered guiltily that he ought to have phoned Theodore now that he knew the answer to the problem which he had set. But it might be better to let him come up with the answer independently. He could be suitably grateful–he could take the old man out to one of those heavy lunches he loved so much, talking the whole afternoon away. Theodore was alone among his contacts in wanting nothing but companionship in return for knowledge.
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He blocked out the chatter around him–Faith was laughing at something Roskill had said–and plunged into the report. The man's casualness concealed an incisive efficiency, which was why he had been seduced from a peacetime air force into this work. All too often the service recruits were those who would never have risen in their original professions. That was the bane of peace-time intelligence. But both Roskill and Butler were exceptions to this rule, conditioned to take orders but with their curiosity and initiative unblunted.
Roskill had evidently charmed the police and the police surgeon; they had worked hard and had given him everything they had found. He had set up precautions, had got through to Butler and had planned today's moves with absolute precision, elaborating on Audley's half-formulated instructions at some points and even anticipating them at others. His style was economical, but occasionally enlivened by asides which give dimension to the bald facts. Audley was used to reading between the lines of such documents, but they seldom gave him such satisfaction.
He zipped up the folder and stared out of the car window at the kaleidoscopic scene. Unlike ordinary roads, which were as much part of any community as the houses and people, motorways were intruders, foreign territory belonging not to the countryside through which they ran, but only to their termini miles away.
He dozed uneasily, conscious that he had lost sleep to make up.
And then he remembered how he had lost the sleep, drifting into a delicious half-dream of recollected passion.
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It was the change in the steady engine note that roused him in the end. The Triumph was leaving the fast lane, slowing and sliding into a slip road, towards an ugly motel sprawl. It drew up alongside a Rover in the nearly empty parking lot, and Audley recognised Butler's rufous bullet-head.
Butler didn't stir, but his driver was out of the car before the Triumph had stopped.
'We're swapping cars here just in case,' said Roskill, without turning the engine off.
Audley climbed stiffly out and followed Faith and Roskill into the Rover. The Triumph rolled away from them with its new driver, towards the petrol pumps, and Roskill accelerated past it without a sideways glance. The whole manoeuvre had been accomplished with the suspicious smoothness Audley associated with bank robberies.
He sighed. This was the aspect of his work which he had hitherto managed to avoid–and rightly, or it was as boring and superficially childish as he had always imagined it to be, undignified by the undertone of danger.
Butler passed him a file, the identical twin superficially of that Roskill had passed him earlier.
'Georges Leopold Bloch,' he explained brusquely. 'The late Georges Leopold Bloch.'
This time Audley did not begin to open the folder, but merely waited for Butler to elaborate.
'Late and unlamented for the last quarter of a century. Fished out of dummy4
an Antwerp dock ten days after we chucked him out of England.
Knocked about first, then knocked out and dumped over the side.
No clues, police not interested. Case closed.'
There was no need to ask why the Belgian police had not been interested. Before he had strayed briefly and fatally into private investigation Bloch had been a policeman, and he had been a little too helpful to the German occupation authorities. Not helpful enough to be prosecuted, but enough to be sacked. There'd be some scores to settle there and his former comrades would not be unduly disturbed that someone had settled them. Bloch would have been an inconvenient memory conveniently erased.
'I talked to his widow,' said Butler. 'Re-married and not pleased to be reminded about him. Stupid little man, she said he was. Backed the wrong horse, and nobody would employ him.'
But somebody had employed him in the end.
'Then one night he got a phone call. Spoke in German and cheered up no end. Told her he'd got friends and things were going to be better. Went to England–came back scared stiff. Four days later, went out and didn't come back. Good riddance–she didn't actually say it, but she said he was a loser, with the mark on him.'
It fitted well enough. The cargo had to be received by someone. If the hijackers were German they'd not have been able to get into England very easily just then. A Belgian would do well, particularly a Belgian who had been tied in with them. It might even be that Bloch's helpfulness to the Germans had been more incriminating than his colleagues had suspected. In which case his new employers would have a useful guarantee of his loyalty.
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But why had the price of failure been so severe? It certainly hadn't been Bloch's fault that he had failed to make contact. Nor would failure under such circumstances frighten him.
It could only mean that Panin had been back-tracking to catch up with the hijackers, and that Bloch had guessed he'd caught a tiger.
Audley shivered. The hands which had slapped Morrison yesterday had been controlled by the same agency, motivated by the same aims, as those which had beaten up Bloch in Antwerp all those years ago. Steerforth had raised the devil again.
IX
The chill remained with him as he walked beside Faith through the Sunday morning streets of Knaresborough. If Steerforth had raised the devil, they were also in some sense on the devil's work, with their own load of trouble and mischief.
With a start he realised they were actually passing Tierney's electrical shop. It seemed quite substantial, with one window loaded with television sets garnished with offers of allegedly amazing terms. Tierney had done better in life than Morrison–