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"Mr—?" Strode didn't wait to be introduced.
"Audley."
"Mr. Audley . . . Colonel Butler asked me this morning if I could come to see you now—here." The eyes flicked briefly towards Butler. "You both represent a branch of the security services?"
"That's correct."
"I can give you five minutes. In ten minutes' time I'm seeing the Royalist commander. You can have half that time, no more."
"I might want more than that, Mr. Strode."
"It's all you can have."
Audley smiled his most unfriendly smile. "Then I shall have to be brief, won't I? Mr. Strode, I want your help."
Strode said nothing for a few seconds, as though an appeal for aid hadn't been what he was expecting.
"Indeed?" he said finally. "Or?"
"Or—what?"
"Or what will you do if I don't choose to help you?" The gleam in Strode's eye was obstinate now. "After all, helping the internal security service isn't going to make me popular in my own party. If I help you I take a risk. It doesn't happen to be a risk I want to take."
"But I haven't told you what sort of help I want."
"You don't need to. I know the Roundhead Wing has some dummy5
pretty far-out types in it—political extremists you people are bound to be interested in. But I intend to beat them my way without your help, Mr. Audley. By the rule book and the ballot box, I shall beat them."
"Not Charlie Ratcliffe, you won't beat him that way." Audley shook his head.
"Charlie—?"
"That's right. Because Charlie isn't going to use the rule book and the ballot box. He's going to use the printing press. And he's going to do to you, Mr. Strode —and people like you—
what the South Africans are alleged to have done to the Liberal Party. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about him, Mr. Strode. But there just may be something I can do—with your co-operation."
Strode stared at him. "You mean . . . you're just after Ratcliffe, no one else?"
"Ratcliffe—and whoever helped him murder James Ratcliffe."
Strode frowned. "You're re-opening the murder case?"
"It was never closed. Though, to be frank, I don't give a stuff who killed who—I already know that. But I want Ratcliffe to start worrying about it, so I want the word out that the police are pursuing a promising new line of inquiry. And I want that rumour to start at the very top—from you."
The cast of calculation was in Strode's eye now. "That's no problem. That's pure law-and-order."
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"The next thing's no more difficult. . . . Will you be at Standingham next weekend?"
"Of course. I'm playing the part of Sir Edmund Steyning."
"With Charlie as Nathaniel Parrott?" Audley smiled. "It's all planned, is it?"
"It's the biggest show we've ever put on." Strode nodded, more cautiously this time. "The BBC is filming it for television, so we're aiming at a maximum muster."
"And it's all planned?"
Strode nodded again. "The advance party will be going down on Thursday to set the scene. Then there's a full-dress rehearsal on the Friday evening, and we'll stage the storming for the public on the Saturday and the Sunday. With any luck we'll have a turn out of at least eight hundred."
"Eight hundred and one now. I shall be attaching myself to your staff, Sir Edmund."
Strode frowned. "You can't fight if you aren't a member. I can't break our own rules."
"I don't want to fight. I want to be free to 'come and go and look and know'—put me down as a friend of yours, or a foreign observer, or whatever you like. But one way or another, Mr. Strode, I want to be there to breathe down Charlie Ratcliffe's neck. I'm going to run him to hounds, and run him to ground—and then I'm going to dig him out and let him go again, and hunt him again—until he doesn't know whether it's April 1st or Christmas Day. And you're going to dummy5
let me do it, with no questions asked and no answers given . . . which you'll do for the same reason that Oliver Cromwell came down on the Levellers: either we break them or they break us."
They stared at each other. The five minutes was long passed, thought Audley, but for this cause a Royalist general ought to be indulgent.
Strode blinked at last. "All right, Audley. . . . But not for that reason."
Audley shrugged. "Then whatever reason you like."
"I don't like—and neither should you." Strode shook his head. "It's because there'll always be someone like you, whoever wins. But if Charlie Ratcliffe has his way you won't have to ask me to help you—you'll be giving the orders. And I wouldn't like that."
Butler lingered at the door, one eye on the hall until Strode had gone.
"And now?" he said.
"And now—if they start cracking anywhere, Jack—then we're in with a chance."
"Aye. And if they don't?"
"Then we fail." Audley met the odds blandly. "This is bloody politics, man. We do our best, but we go by the rule book, like Mr. Moderate William Strode. So at least we don't get our fingers burnt picking up someone else's chestnuts."
Butler grimaced at him. "You don't think we've got a hope, do dummy5
you? You're just causing mischief, that's all."
Audley shrugged. "All right, then. Let's say: 'Mischief, do thy work', Jack. Maybe it will, at that."
"Aye." Butler looked out of the window, towards the cavaliers guarding the bridge. "But whose work will it do, I wonder?"
Part Two:
How to be a bad winner
1
15. Royalist Army regroups. Final exhortation by Lord Monson (to be relayed by loudspeaker to crowd). Pioneers will obtain fresh fascines.
16. Roundhead Army regroups. Regimental commanders to ensure that no personnel are within fifty (50) yards of glacis below Great Bastion (red flag markers).
17. 4.40: Special Effects Section will fire simulated magazine explosion.
18. 4.41: The Great Assault. Pioneers will . . .
It had taken Audley four days to complete his report on the current state of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was dummy5
three days less than he had allowed himself originally; and which, he reminded himself irritably, would have left him ten days buckshee holiday with Faith and Cathy if he hadn't been conned, bullied and dragooned into messing around with politicians' chestnuts to absolutely no effect.
He looked up from the Double R Society's scenario for the storming of Standingham Castle to check the time by the grandfather clock beside his study door.
Absolutely no effect as of 10.15 a.m., Thursday August 28.
Nobody had panicked, nobody had misbehaved, nobody had done anything that he ought not to have done. Nobody had done anything.
In a minute or two Faith would bring him a cup of coffee, and with luck she would kiss him, and since the heat of the day was yet to come he would kiss her back; and at 10.30 he would phone Jack Butler, and Jack would report that nothing had happened since 6 p.m. the previous evening, at considerable cost to the taxpayer.
He reached across his desk to check his assignment diary.
(Afterwards, when he looked at the diary, before he dropped it in his waste-paper basket, he would recall 10.15 a.m., Thursday, August 28, with what he assumed must be the same bitterness as that with which some US Navy veterans must remember the last few minutes before 7.55 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. By that time there was nothing they could do to stop the Japanese bombs and torpedoes, just as by that time there was nothing he could have done to dummy5
stop Sergeant Henry Digby going down to the Ferryhill Industrial Estate in answer to a phone call the nature of which he never was able to establish. But those last minutes of peace of mind, before everything changed, were still the moments to regret.)