"Of course." Under the circumstances Weston had already shown remarkable courtesy in even coming to the phone.
"Thank you for sparing the time. Good-bye then, Superintendent—and good hunting."
"Don't you worry about that. We'll get them." Weston was coldly businesslike. "I'm sorry about . . . your business. But there's nothing I can do about that at the moment. Goodbye, Audley."
"It was the IRA," said Audley.
"Oh," said Faith. "Oh ... I'm sorry, David ... I mean—I'm sorry."
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She turned away.
Audley watched the door close.
Acceptance.
Just say It was the IRA and you receive acceptance. Anger and bitterness and helplessness and bafflement—and acceptance. Even from a total professional, with the evidence served up steaming on a plate, the acceptance was automatic.
Except, to be fair, Weston was still in pursuit at this moment, and the unanswered questions had to wait in such circumstances.
Like—what the hell was Henry Digby doing on the Ferryhill Industrial Estate, way off course, at ten o'clock in the morning?
Audley picked up the phone again and dialled.
"Colonel Butler? Anything doing, Jack?"
Grunt. "Pretty quiet."
"Absolutely nothing you could put your finger on?"
"No. . . . Haven't had the morning reports yet, of course."
"You sound as though you've reservations about that."
Grunt. "Nothing tangible. We've pulled off the front men now, of course—did that on Tuesday midday, as I told you yesterday."
That was routine. The obvious watchers, having established their presence, had removed themselves, leaving the dummy5
observation to more unobtrusive and sophisticated men and machines in the hope that fear or foolishness might now betray any guilty party into activity. It was a crude bit of psychology, but it was occasionally successful nevertheless.
"And?"
"Nothing. But the man Davenport worries me. He visited the American Embassy on Tuesday."
"No reason why he shouldn't. Did our inside man there know what he did there?"
"Apparently not. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if he wasn't getting ready to run for it, that's all."
"Why d'you think that?"
"Hard to say. . . . He's been buying one or two little extras, paying one or two debts. . . . And I had Maitland search his flat."
"Maitland?" Audley lined up the technical support men in his mind and picked out a freckle-faced expert with hair even more ginger than Butler's. "Yes, I know him. A good man."
"He didn't find anything. But he had the strong impression that Davenport was expecting to be searched—the way things were left. And he said he couldn't guarantee that Davenport wouldn't know his place hadn't been turned over, if that was the case, because he couldn't leave every hair in its original position."
"I understand—which would make Davenport a pro."
Maitland—of course!
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"Very well." Audley steadied his voice. Maitland had once a partner, a clever young trainee who had got himself blown up while examining a booby-trapped car. . . . "You'd better put a watch on the ports and airports, Jack. If Davenport moves—
if any of them move—pick 'em up and hold 'em."
"For what?"
"Suppression of Terrorism Act. No lawyers and no phone calls until I've seen them. And see that their bags aren't searched, too."
Jenkins, that was the boy's name. He'd been the younger brother of a friend of Hugh Roskill's. And it had been Butler himself who had brought the news of his death—to this very house, four or five years back. . . .
"And you meet me at the Steyning Arms at Standingham tonight, Jack. As arranged."
Jenkins.
The Jenkins Gambit, he had called it, because Jenkins himself had been the booby-trappers' target: the best way to kill a food taster is by poisoning his master's dish—then it looks like an occupational hazard.
And, by the same token, the best way to murder a policeman was to kill him in the execution of his duty, where sudden death was an occupational hazard which good coppers could be relied on to accept.
And Digby had been a good copper.
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Audley stared at the grandfather clock.
And now Digby was a dead copper.
The thought of Digby dead was a physical pain. He would never see Digby again. He would never introduce Frances Fitzgibbon to Digby, that little matchmaking dream of Faith's
—a crazy dream, but no bad dream—was gone like smoke on a summer's day. He had only known the boy for a few hours, and the boy had felt nothing for him but curiosity, yet the sense of loss was none the less bitter for that. It was boys—
and men—like Digby who held the sky suspended; taken for granted in life, and mourned only briefly in the headlines in death, more out of public piety than from conviction.
Henry Digby was dead, and he would rot and putrefy, and long before he was dust he would be forgotten. Even Audley himself, who might be as guilty as the killer, would soon relegate him to a dull ache of conscience, and then a mere regret, and at the last a hazy memory of one job that hadn't gone according to plan years ago.
Faith was in the doorway, beside the grandfather clock.
"It's been on the news, David—the twelve o'clock news."
He looked at her stupidly. "About Digby?"
"They didn't mention him by name. They said a policeman had been shot and killed, and that the army had defused a bomb—" She stopped.
"Yes?" He could see that there was more.
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"But there was another bomb that went off—a car bomb. Two other people have been killed."
"Yes?"
"They think they were in the car. They're not sure, but they think so. And the police think they may have been the bombers themselves."
There was a nuance of satisfaction in her voice. No one was more resolute against the death penalty than Faith, but when God Himself jogged the hand on the bomb she was as bloodthirsty as any sans-culotte in her approval of the execution.
Now only the clock was staring at him.
Thesis: it had been Watson's "pure bad luck", with Digby going down to the estate to his death for some simple innocent reason. Bad luck with an Irish accent, and an IRA codeword and an IRA bomb to prove it, begorrah.
The minute hand moved.
Antithesis: bombs and brogues proved nothing, and passwords and codewords were known; and any killer with the price of a phone call could have lured Henry Digby to meet his bullet, anywhere, any time—and who better than Charlie Ratcliffe, who had hired death once already? Charlie, whom they'd been driving towards action, driving with cold deliberation towards the belief that there was something very wrong with his beautiful golden plan.
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And now the car bomb.
Another minute.
Thesis: it had happened before and it would happen again, the bomber fragmented by his own bomb. Bombs were no respectors of persons, Weathermen, Irishmen, Palestinians, housewives on the way to the supermarket, golden lads and lasses. And, as he well knew, those American time pencils from Vietnam were notoriously unreliable.
Antithesis: killers killed to a pattern, and stripped of all their superficial differences this was Swine Brook Field all over again, by God! Because but for the accident of Digby's presence Swine Brook Field would have been a nice neat accident too. Sooner or later in the controlled violence of the Double R Society's battles someone might have caught the butt-end of a pike. And now sooner or later had caught both Sergeant Digby and his killers.
But if his thesis was right?
That was the temptation. All he had to do was to accept his own innocence, and he was in the clear. Without Digby's special knowledge he would be half-blind at Standingham this evening and tomorrow and on Saturday. He could do his best and fail, and no one would blame him very much. Some you won and some you lost, and Sir Frederick would be the first to admit that politics was the very devil.