'There are two points I'm still unclear on,' said Audley slowly. 'You hardly knew Steerforth, yet you knew he was a selfish bastard?'
Jones nodded.
'I married his widow. My knowledge of Steerforth is second-hand, but I'd say it's better than first-hand really.
'When I decided to ask Margaret to marry me I wanted to make sure I didn't have a ghost lying in bed between us. Maybe some men could just forget that there was a past. I couldn't, because I just wasn't sure he was dead. So I had to exorcise him, alive or dead. To do that I had to make her tell me about him.'
'Wasn't that rather cruel?'
'If she'd loved him it would have been. But they didn't even like each other any more. Only she didn't know that until she'd heard herself say it–to me. Then I knew I wouldn't have to share her with him.'
Audley cast a sidelong glance at Jones. Half a loaf would never have been good enough for him. The file had assessed him as an innocent bystander whose involvement with Steerforth had been accidental. Only his subsequent marriage with the man's widow made him suspect. But now that too could be discounted. Not only dummy4
was there no likelihood that he was withholding anything on Steerforth, but it was unlikely also that Steerforth would have confided in a wife who bored him.
Nevertheless Jones's own assessment of that last flight tallied usefully with Butler's and his own: it had the smell of a put-up job.
The silence of the hillside was broken by the sound of a car climbing the gradient. As it reached the level stretch below them it began to accelerate, then slowed down and pulled into the verge beyond Audley's. Roskill got out and looked expectantly up at Audley.
Again he had the feeling that the action was outrunning the script.
For Roskill to disturb him like this only trouble was sufficient reason.
He stumped down to the road with undignified haste.
'I'm sorry to break in on you, Dr Audley,' Roskill apologised, 'but when I phoned in to the office to say I was coming home there was an urgent message for you. I'm to tell you that the professor–no names, just the professor -has been positively identified in East Berlin. And rumour puts him on a flight to London on Tuesday.'
Audley blinked unhappily, and Roskill completely misconstrued his reaction.
'I'm sorry it sounds so bloody mysterious, but that's exactly what the Harlin said, and I'm afraid it comes from that JIG character, not Fred.'
Audley tried to think. A moment before the task ahead seemed reasonably clear, no matter how unfamiliar his own role in it was: a dummy4
simple and leisurely reconstruction of the events of the last week in Steerforth's career, with the willing or unwilling help of the survivors of his crew. Panin had only been a potential complication.
But now Panin was a reality, and Panin appeared to be on the move. And unlike Audley, Panin knew exactly what he was doing.
He grasped the nettle. 'Hugh, I'm going back to London at once.
You run Jones home and then get tracing the crew as fast as you can. Tell Butler to drop everything and get after the Belgian.'
He turned towards Jones, who had stepped on to the road a discreet distance away.
'Trouble?' There was a suggestion of amused sympathy in Jones's eyes.
'What makes you think that, Mr Jones?'
'The same reason I wasn't too surprised to see you. If you've got Steerforth, you've got trouble: you can't just bury men like Steerforth.'
'You may have him too, Mr Jones.'
'I've got a shotgun too. Just leave me your telephone number, and I'll let you know if I shoot something interesting.'
III
Audley stared from his study window out across the South Downs and tried to make sense of Nikolai Andrievich Panin.
dummy4
Usually he found it relaxing to watch the evening spread over that landscape, dissolving the familiar landmarks one by one. But Panin refused to let him relax on this evening.
The Russian had to be the key to Steerforth. It was his involvement alone which had kept the dead pilot alive in the files over the last decade; it was his interest which- had aroused the department and had even provided Fred with an honourable way of sacking Audley: Panin was big enough to make the sack look like promotion.
Big enough, but wholly enigmatic. For no one seemed to know what made Panin tick and what kept him wound up. He hadn't been tagged as a coming man until after he had arrived, and then it was too late. They had simply never caught up with him.
Audley looked down at the thin file in front of him and the pathetic handful of notes he had made during the afternoon. Kremlinology was at best a foggy enterprise, more divination than detection, full of Delphic hypotheses about men whose passion for secrecy appeared at times to be pathological.
But Panin had raised this passion to an art form.
There wasn't an ounce of meat on the bones of the man's career. He had allegedly been at Moscow university before the war, and certainly returned to it afterwards, emerging as an acknowledged expert in the arts and customs of the ancient Scythians, for what that was worth. In between he had been a staff officer in Khalturin's crack division of Chuikov's army, and that in theory brought him to Berlin in 1945. But between the time he had been identified across the public bar of the Bull Inn, Newton Chester, dummy4
and his appearance at the famous Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, when Kruschev had denounced Stalin, nobody seemed to have set eyes on him. He had been as quiet as Steerforth.
So someone had been keeping Panin on ice among his Scythian burial mounds, in preparation for the better days between the Twentieth and Twenty-Second congresses. Yet he wasn't one of Kruschev's 'golden boys', like Polyansky: he was everybody's man and nobody's man.
Moreover he seemed to Audley to have the remarkable talent of knowing unerringly when to be somewhere else.
He had been as far away from the Kruschev faction in '64 as he had been from the doomed followers of Malenkov and Molotov in '57.
Even the single relationship which tied him in with the intelligence agencies was equivocal, through the last hypothetical co-ordinator of the KGB and the GRU, Mironov.
But Mironov was a Brezhnev appointment, and he had no links with Brezhnev. And when Mironov flew so mysteriously into a Yugoslav hillside four days after the fall of Kruschev, Panin was visiting a dig in the far-off Altai mountains.
Intelligent anticipation or inside intelligence? The file didn't say, and the bare facts wouldn't tell–and the facts about Panin always seemed to be weeks or months out of date when they finally filtered through.
Even Audley's own Middle Eastern knowledge was made useless by Panin's shrewd uninvolvement with unprofitable causes. If he had been in the ranks of the Shelepin-Semichastny followers dummy4
during Kruschev's defeat, he had been conspicuously absent from them when Kosygin clipped their wings during the June War-Glasboro period.
But a Kosygin man would surely not be on such friendly terms with Grechko, the bully of the East Germans and the Czechs . . .
except that any friend of Grechko ought not to be a friend of Moskalenko . . .
It was no use, no bloody use at all. The names and the convolutions of power swam before Audley's eyes. In the Middle East the protagonists were like old friends, whose reactions were at least partially predictable. But here he was among blank-faced technocrats and strangers, of whom Panin was the strangest of all.
It would take months of study before any of them would start to talk to him through their comings and goings, absences and appearances, and in the oracular reports of their words and deeds.
He had to find a short cut to the man's character, or at the very least, to his motivation in 1945.
Suddenly he realised that his line of thought had been interrupted.
Mrs Clark's geese, the guards of his privacy, had been disturbed; they were shrieking their displeasure at a car which was nosing its way up the track towards the house. He could see its headlights flashing intermittently between the overgrown hedgerows.