Colonel Butler's Wolf Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Aldous Huxley and Chatto & Windus for lines, used on page 52, from “To Lesbia” published in Collected Poems.

  To A. E. Houseman and the Society of Authors for lines, used on page 165, from “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”.

  To Michael Alexander and penguin Books for lines, used on page 181, published in The Earliest English Poems.

  I

  The Master’s Lodging,

  The King’s College,

  Oxford.

  My dear Freisler,

  I know you will remember our conversation in the Fellows’ Garden during last summer’s Rhodes House conference.

  At that time you ridiculed my fears as the nightmares of a suspicious old man. Nevertheless you agreed to pass on my message to those whose duty it is to investigate nightmares, and I have reason to believe that they did not reject it.

  In that belief I have held my hand (if not my tongue) during these last months. But now something has occurred which makes further action imperative.

  I have heard this day of the death of one of my former students …

  BUTLER LISTENED TO the sound of the nurse’s quick step recede down the corridor until it was lost in the nursing home’s silence, an expensive silence as far removed from the National Health Service as a Rolls-Royce was from a five-ton lorry.

  For a moment he stood looking at himself in the mirror on the back of the door. Presumably its function was to enable Matron to check her uniform and her expression before leaving her office to patrol her kingdom; old RSM Hooker had had just such a mirror on his office door in the regimental depot. Likely it was still there, even though Hooker was bones on the Imjin. Some things didn’t change.

  But others did, like the reflection before him. It wasn’t the hard face and the clashing reds of skin and hair which bothered him. They were only a little more out of place over a civilian suit than they had been over a uniform. He had always looked a bit like a prizefighter; now he looked like a retired prizefighter. But where had that air of defeat come from?

  He sighed and turned away. Possibly it came from too many errands like this one, small and nasty errands that he scorned to escape. And which were being given him more and more often, he suspected. It had even been an errand very much like this one which had started Hugh Roskill on his way to this place.

  The thought of Hugh directed his eye to the steel filing cabinets beside the window. Hugh’s case history and progress report would be in there and it would take him ten seconds to pick the silly lock and see for himself how far Hugh was swinging the lead.

  He scowled with disgust: so far down the slope he had come that the exercise of his petty thief’s skills was almost instinctive even when unnecessary. This was all mere routine and Hugh had undoubtedly been telling the simple truth—it wasn’t the sort of thing a man would lie about, even one who enjoyed being fussed over by pretty nurses drawing twice the pay of their overworked sisters in the public service.

  Again he halted his line of thought angrily as he recognised it for what it was: a half-baked, unsubstantiated, left-wing line. He hadn’t the least idea what nurses in exclusive nursing homes earned, and the nurses he had seen so far had been if anything less attractive than those who had looked after Diana in the cottage hospital at home.

  His glance softened as it settled on the three little girls playing on the gravel parking lot outside the window. It wasn’t often that he could combine business with pleasure, but bringing them had been a minor stroke of genius. It had won him a rare extra afternoon with them, and their pleasure in the adventure had been, as complete as Hugh’s in their goggle-eyed hero-worship. There was even a chance that Hugh would never realise the real reason for their presence.

  Yet there had been a cloud for Butler in that meeting which he recognised as a just reward for his duplicity. Inexorably, remorselessly, they were growing up. Today they were delightful kittens, and tomorrow and for a year or two to come. But their little claws would grow and their furry coats would become sleek, and they would be tigresses in the end. One day he would find their mother in them.

  As he felt the knot tighten in his gut he heard the distinctive click-tap quick step—the hospital step—rapping towards him down the passage. With relief he shut his daughters and his late wife out of his mind and turned back towards the door.

  “Major Butler—I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. Do sit down.” Matron’s voice was as crisp as her step. “You have an inquiry about Squadron Leader Roskill, I believe?”

  There was the merest suggestion, a primness about the inflexion of the question, that Matron wasn’t certain he had any right to pry into the exact condition of Roskill’s thigh bone. As if to emphasise her doubt she allowed the palm of her right hand to rest flat on the folder she had taken from the cabinet and placed on the desk in front of her.

  “Squadron Leader Roskill is a colleague of mine at the Ministry of Defense, Matron.” Butler allowed his official tone to trickle into the words gradually. “We are a little short-handed at the moment. We’d like to know when we can expect to have him back with us.”

  “I see.”

  Butler met her gaze with obstinate innocence. In an establishment like this it was reasonable that the fees purchased a measure of loyalty as well as treatment, apart from the simple mathematical fact that the longer Hugh stayed, the louder the final ring on the cash register would be.

  “Well … “ the hand resting on the file relaxed a fraction “ … you must understand that the original injury sustained by Squadron Leader Roskill was a serious one, Major. There was considerable damage to the bone. Whatever is done, there is bound to be a limp. What we are doing is attempting to minimise it.”

  Are doing. That meant that the sawbones was still at work and Hugh wasn’t going back on to the active list for some time yet.

  Butler nodded sympathetically, wondering as he did so just how much Matron knew or guessed about the nature of that original injury. Probably not too much, since Hugh had been taken to one of the Ministry’s own nursing homes in the first place, and they would have passed on only the information they couldn’t possibly conceal.

  The hand opened the file at last.

  “Now—let me see—“ she began.

  “When I’m grown up I think I’ll marry Uncle Hugh.”

  Sally’s childish treble came through the open quarter-window with startling clarity. The three children had moved gradually across the gravel until they were playing directly beneath the office.

  Matron swung round in her chair with a rustle of starched uniform to examine the source of the interruption.

  “Don’t be silly. You’re far too little for him.”

  Diana’s emphasis indicated that she was also in the running for Roskill’s hand, and as the eldest of the three had a much better chance of reaching the winning post first.

  Matron turned back towards Butler. “Your daughters, I believe, Major?”

  “I’m sorry, Matron. I’ll send them back to the car at once—“

  “There’s no need for that.” She smiled at him. “They won’t bother anyone here.”

  “Well, you’d both better wait until he gets better from his accident. He might only have one leg.”

  As always, Jane represented reason and calculation. At nine she was already estimating the odds with a coldness that sometimes worried Butler.

  “They are delightful, Major—quite delightful.”

  “He didn’t have an accident, stupid—he was shot.”

  “I know he was. But Daddy tells people it was an accident.”

  “And he shot all the people who shot him.”

  “Only one person shot him, Sally.”

  “Well, he sh
ot lots of them”

  The smile on Matron’s face had turned sickly with unbelief. It struck Butler that she was probably mirroring his own expression.

  “Only three, there were.”

  “Four.”

  Butler rose from his chair and reached for the window-latch.

  “Three. I heard Daddy say three to that man.”

  The latch stuck maddeningly as Sally groped for a riposte to Jane’s irritatingly factual claim. How the devil had they heard anything when they should have been safe in bed and long asleep?

  The latch yielded, but one catastrophic second too late : short of a rational reply, Sally took refuge in an irrational one—

  “Well, Daddy’s shot hundreds of men—hundreds!”

  For a moment Butler stared at the three upturned little faces, little round freckled faces. At the start of that moment he had wanted to tell them that it wasn’t so and that of all things death was not the measure of manhood.

  Then he saw beyond them the great frozen lake north of Chonggosong, and the Mustangs he had summoned up sweeping down on it in front of him … they had been wearing white parkas, the Chinese, when they’d come streaming down over the Yalu, but sweat and dirt and grease had turned the’ white to a yellow that stood out clearly against the snow …

  “Hallo, Daddy,” said Sally.

  “Go on back to the car, darling,” said Butler carefully. “Here—catch the keys, Diana. You can turn the radio on.”

  He watched her shoo her sisters safely away from the window before turning back into the room. He had been lamentably careless in forgetting that little pitchers had large ears— it had never even occurred to him.

  Only when he was settled comfortably in his chair again did he lift his eyes to meet Matron’s, and then with unruffled indifference. The damage was done, but like the absence of the notes on Roskill’s operation it was of no importance. It might be hate and anger she felt, or even horror. Or only distaste and contempt.

  But it was all one to Butler. He had his instructions and she had her proper duty, and he would see that she fulfilled hers as correctly as he carried out his, one way or another. It was always more pleasant if it could be done with a smile, but he no longer expected that luxury.

  “Now, Matron,” he said unemotionally, “just when is Squadron Leader Roskill likely to be on his feet again?”

  It was enough, and had always been enough, and always would be enough, to be on the Queen’s service.

  II

  “J. DINGLE—TWO RINGS” was inscribed on a piece of plain cardboard in a cellophane holder on the left of the door.

  Butler sniffed, picking up the faint tang of sea air, and scrutinised the inscription. The letters were spidery and slightly shaky, which fitted in with what the lodge-keeper at Eden Hall had told him : “old Mr Dingle” had been in both the World Wars, which placed him well into his seventies at the least.

  He sniffed again. It seemed unlikely that J. Dingle would remember anything useful about the late Neil Smith even if he lived up to the lodge-keeper’s assertion that in the matter of old pupils of Eden Hall “old Mr Dingle was bound to know”. Smith had likely been an inky fourteen-year-old when Dingle had last seen him, and that not less than nine years before. The real pay-dirt, whatever dirt there was in Smith’s short career, would be in the more recent levels. This visit to Westcliffe-on-Sea was no more than routine.

  But that thought, once weighed and evaluated, pleased and invigorated Butler, and he reached forward and rang the bell, two firm, decisive rings. Routine action generally proved fruitless, and was normally boring, but it could never be regarded as wasteful. Rather, it was proof that whoever was co-ordinating an operation was leaving nothing to chance, and that was how Butler liked things to be.

  Beyond the red and green glass panels of the door someone was stirring : J. Dingle, summoned by his two rings. It was a comfortless, solid house, redbrick and bourgeois, dating from the days when Westcliffe-on-Sea tradesmen could afford to tuck a servant or two in the attics under the eaves. And now, built just too far from the sea to decline into a boarding house, it had turned into a respectable nest of small flats for single retired people whose private pensions or prudently invested savings enable them to scorn state aid.

  Among whom was J. Dingle: the door swung open and Butler and J. Dingle considered each other in silence for a moment.

  “Mr Dingle?”

  A small nod. Butler drew his identification folder from his breast pocket and politely offered it to the old man. With the elderly, courtesy was their right as well as his duty.

  “I,wonder if I might have a few words with you, Mr Dingle?” Dingle stared at Butler over his half-glasses with eyes that seemed much younger than the rest of his face— bright, birdlike eyes set in wizened and folded skin which reminded Butler of the brazils that had appeared in his home every Christmas to linger on in their bowl for months because no one had the patience to crack them.

  The eyes left Butler’s face at last in order to examine the folder, flicking back to compare the face with the photograph, then lowering again to decipher the small print.

  At length the examination was complete and the eyes returned, still without expression—it was as though Dingle’s three-score years and ten had exhausted his ability to react outwardly to any event, no matter how unlooked-for.

  “You’d better come inside then, Major Butler,” the old man beckoned abruptly with a mottled, claw-like hand into the dark hallway in which the light from outside picked out the highlights of polished woodwork and linoleum.

  Butler waited for him to close the door, and then followed him down the passageway, stooping uneasily, to avoid a ceiling which he guessed was far above his head. Now that he was inside it, the house seemed to press in on him.

  He was not prepared for the room into which Dingle finally ushered him, a high, well-proportioned room, full of leather-bound books and photographs in silver frames jostling each other on small mahogany tables. There was a fire bright with smokeless fuel in the hearth and a smell of good tobacco. The pity he had begun to feel for Dingle was transmuted instantly into something close to envy—“poor old Mr Dingle” became “lucky old Dingle”.

  The old man pointed to a chair on one side of the fire, waiting until Butler had sunk himself into it before settling in one on the other side of the fireplace.

  “Just what is it that you want of me?”

  “Some information.”

  “Tck ! Tck !” Dingle clucked pettishly. “Of course you want information. I may be ancient, but I’m not senile. And I recognise one of those signatures on that little card of yours— though he was only a junior civil servant when I knew him.”

  Butler frowned, momentarily at a loss, and Dingle pounced on him.

  “Not done your homework, Major?” The lipless mouth puckered briefly and then tightened again. “Perhaps I am leaping to a false conclusion about your arcane purposes. But there was a time in the Second War when I ran errands between MID and NID, and I recall him perfectly—I never forget a name or a face. Not yet, anyway.”

  Not senile, thought Butler, certainly not senile—even if he had jumped to a conclusion. It was, after all, a reasonable conclusion in the circumstances, however coincidental those might actually be.

  But it was strange to think of this skeletal old gentleman striding down corridors which he himself used.

  Butler’s eyes strayed involuntarily to the framed photographs on the table beside him. Individuals in cap and gown, team groups in the comically long shorts of yesterday’s sports or immaculate in striped blazers and white flannels; Dingle had been a sportsman in his faraway youth. There was even a group of officers and men dating, by their moustaches, Sam Brownes and puttees, from the ‘14-‘18 war.

  “You will not find it easy to recognise me there.”

  Butler engaged the bright eyes again. It was time to assert himself. “Not at all, sir,” he snapped. “You’re third from the left in the cricket picture, sec
ond row, on the far right in the rugger one and in the centre of the infantry group.”

  Lashless shutters of skin descended half-way across Dingle’s eyes in what was presumably an expression of surprise. Which was gratifying even though there was no mystery in the identification: if none of those youthful faces in any way resembled this wrinkled mask there was still one nondescript young face that was common to all the groups and which must therefore be yesteryear’s Dingle.

  “I’m here rather by accident, sir,” Butler continued stiffly. “I had intended to call on the headmaster, but it seems that the school is shut up for half term. I was told that you might be able to help me.”

  Dingle remained silent.

  “I am interested in one of your former pupils, Mr Dingle. I believe you may be able to help me.”

  Still the old man said nothing. Butler sensed rather than noticed a wariness in him.

  “The name of the man—the boy, that is—was Smith. Neil Smith.”

  At last Dingle spoke. “Smith is not an uncommon name, Major Butler. The Christian name is not significant, I have never addressed a boy by his Christian name. Neil Smith means no more to me than any other Smith, and I have taught a great many of them.”

  “I think you may remember this Smith. He was a clever boy.”

  Dingle regarded him coolly over his half-glasses.

  “Five per cent of all boys are clever, Major. Apart from the wartime interruptions I have been teaching for over half a century. Now, how many clever boys … how many clever Smiths … do you think I have instructed in Latin grammar and English grammar in half a century?”

  Butler sighed. It always had to be either the hard way or the easy way, but with a man like this, with this background, he had a right to expect it to be easy.

  “You taught him from 1957 to 1962, Mr Dingle,” he said. “In 1962 his parents emigrated to New Zealand—he went from Eden Hall to Princess Alice’s School, Hokitikoura. Have many of your pupils gone to Hokitikoura?”

  Dingle’s mouth pursed with distaste: there was no need for Butler to remind him further that on his own testimony he never forgot a name or a face. There could be no doubts now in his mind as to the exact identity of Neil Smith among the five per cent of the clever Smiths.