Gunner Kelly Read online

  PART ONE

  How Colonel Butler’s

  breakfast was spoilt

  I

  COLONEL BUTLER loved all his three girls equally, but (as he was accustomed to tell himself when they presented their problems to him) differently. Because, notwithstanding the identical red of their hair, they were entirely different people.

  And that was why Jane had his attention now across the breakfast table, absolutely but unequally with the disquiet which he might have diverted from his Times to Sally or Diana.

  “I said, Father,” she repeated, “I think I have done something rather silly.”

  “Yes.” Butler nodded gravely, just as he would have done for Sally or Diana, but without the pretence which paternal gravity would have required for them. “I heard you the first time, Jane.”

  He stopped there, and the difference widened with his silence and hers. With Sally and Diana he would have added some soothing verbal placebo. But then, with Sally it would have been merely something to do with horses, and with Diana merely something to do with men; but it was the horse that Sally loved, not (in spite of temporary infatuations) any particular horse; and Diana, whose physical resemblance to her late mother went disturbingly more than skin deep, seemed to feel much the same way about men; and in both cases Colonel Butler and his money had together proved more than a match for any emergency in the past.

  But Jane was different.

  “Tell me—” Butler overcame his Anglo-Saxon reticence with a conscious effort “—darling.”

  With Jane it was different: with Jane, from the moment when she had ceased to be a thing and had become a person, life had been reason and calculation, not emotion. With Jane, Butler had never been sure whether she was the least loving or the most loving of his children—whether, because she felt most deeply, she had armoured herself most carefully against feeling, or whether, because she felt nothing, she was impervious to life’s shot and shell. And so, because he loved her equally, he had found himself worrying about her more, because she brought him fewer problems, and those almost purely academic, balancing one relative benefit coldly against another: Mathematics or English (she excelled at both)? Oxbridge or Bristol (mathematician or barrister, and no serious question about entry, but a faint sympathy in Butler himself for other mathematicians or prisoners at the bar eventually … just as his ultimate sympathy in her sisters’ cases was not truly with them, but with the horses and men they chose to ride into the ground, which were the animals with which—with whom—he himself could identify, having been similarly ridden in his time)?

  But she was still his daughter—his flesh and his red hair and his responsibility and his equal love; and now—his instinct and experience both told—she was in deep trouble at last, who had never been in such trouble before.

  The realisation of that, cold as the shrill, distant sound of Chinese bugles blowing the charge against the last handful of his company in Korea, stripped all Butler’s worries away from him momentarily (the true leak at Cheltenham, which was not the one the Russians had so carefully let them have … Mitchell and Andrew could only handle that at a pinch; but the problem with the Americans could only be dealt with by David Audley, whose own private links with the CIA would have to be cashed in when he got back from leave …. So he would have to give St John Latimer carte blanche at Cheltenham—the more he disliked Latimer, who hated Audley, the more he inconveniently needed both of them to do what had to be done—even though Audley coveted that job …).

  But for the moment it was Jane who mattered—

  “Tell me, darling.” This time he managed something close to encouragement, if not sympathy.

  “Yes …” Some other process of reasoning, very different in content, but equal in duration and sufficient to nerve her to answer him, animated Jane “… Father, you remember when I took the little car last week … ?”

  As though summoned by the memory, Sally breezed out of the kitchen into the breakfast-room, carrying her enormous horsewoman’s breakfast.

  “I remember. It was last Saturday, to be exact,” Sally agreed. “Because I had to get a lift to the gymkhana the other side of Winchester that day—”

  “Go and eat in the kitchen, Sal.” Jane looked up at her sister uncompromisingly. “I’ve got business to transact with Father.”

  Sally gave her younger sibling one quick, sharp glance, and then picked up the plate again and was gone before Butler could say a word. And that, if anything had been required to consolidate Butler’s disquiet, confirmed it beyond question: however much they might be at odds on day-to-day matters, they never failed to decode each other’s Most Urgent signals in an emergency.

  Silly was what worried him now. Because, where Sally and Diana were given to hyperbole, Jane’s weakness was understatement, so that she would not admit to being unwell until she was too ill to walk.

  Suddenly, he found himself simultaneously suppressing reasons for panic while discounting them: she was only nineteen years old, but hard-headed and sensible with it… but she was still only nineteen years old—

  The Mini was still in pristine condition—he had washed it himself on Sunday, and it bore no marks of any chance encounters—and Jane wasn’t the hit-and-run type— Or … No—No. Butler had staked his life on several occasions when the odds were better not computed, but he was quite happy to stake it again this morning across the breakfast-table that his youngest daughter wasn’t pregnant. All the known facts of circumstance and character were against it, apart from the cheerfulness of her greeting only a few minutes before—

  Only a few minutes before? Butler’s eyes dropped to the table, to beside her plate on it: one letter, but hand-written, not official—just a few lines on a single sheet of paper, without even an address so far as he could see at the distance and upside-down—hardly more than a brief scrawl, but signed with a flourish—

  He raised his eyes to meet hers, with his imagination up against a blank wall of incomprehension.

  “I went to see David, Father.”

  “David?” Jane had no boyfriend named David. In fact, Jane had no boy-friend, full-stop.

  “Uncle David, Father.”

  Butler was there as she spoke. David was David Audley—and, somewhat to his surprise, that in itself was reassuring: no matter how eccentric, even maverick, Audley might be in professional matters, when it came to Jane he had no doubt that the man would behave responsibly. Even … with the untimely death of Jane’s godfather, Audley rather quaintly regarded himself as an unofficial substitute for that role, for which only one other parent had regarded him suitable, to his chagrin.

  So, for once at least, and in this instance in particular, Audley could be trusted, surely—

  Surely? He looked at Jane. “You went to see David Audley?”

  “About Becky, Father—Becky Smith.” Jane nodded.

  “Becky Smith?” Butler repeated the name blankly, aware that he might have registered any young man’s name for future reference, but that no female from school or university would have fixed herself in his mind unless he could add a face to a name. And there was no file in his memory on any Becky Smith.

  “Rebecca Maxwell-Smith—you don’t know her, Father, but I’ve mentioned her. She’s reading Law with me—we live the same hall of residence … I had dinner with her in grandfather once—you remember, I told you, Father.”

  Something faintly registered now, but only faintly. “So?” He was ashamed to admit the faint registration.

  “So she had this hare-brained idea—more than harebrained, bloody mad … But she was hell-bent on it, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her—absolutely bloody mad … But I thought I had to stop her somehow …” She tailed off, and the very imprecision of her account of what Rebec
ca Maxwell-Smith was hell-bent on re-animated Butler’s concern, for all that it was safely one step away from her now; because if there was one thing that Jane Butler was—apart from being nineteen and hard-headed and sensible—it was to the point. And at the moment she was circling the point like a mongoose round a snake.

  Even Butler himself was infected by her caution. “Why didn’t you come to me?” She would come to the vital answer in her own good time, with no need for the question.

  “You didn’t come home on Friday.” She excused herself by accusing him. “Becky phoned—I was going to ask you, but you weren’t there … And you always said, if there was a problem Nannie Hooker couldn’t solve, and you weren’t here, we could phone Uncle David.”

  True, thought Butler. But that was for you—and your problems. And the odds on this one are that you probably wouldn’t have asked me anyway.… Yet, at the same time, it was the old fatal error he had made, of giving a precise command imprecisely, so that she had been able to obey him in circumstances he had not envisaged, disobediently.

  “So what did he say?” This time, as he phrased the indirect question with false sincerity, leaving Rebecca Maxwell-Smith’s as-yet-unrevealed madness even further behind, he felt that little frisson of excitement he always did where David Audley was involved: no one could ever be quite sure what Audley would do in any situation, including Audley himself.

  “He said he’d help—of course.” Jane’s expression indicated that she had only just discovered what her father and others had learnt by experience. “But now I’ve received this from Becky—!”

  She pushed the letter across the table towards Butler.

  There were only a dozen or so words on it, with no sender’s address, as he had already noted, and no date either.

  Jay—Thanks a million for sending us your David.

  Now we really have a chance of pulling it off—

  Love, Becky

  Butler looked at his daughter interrogatively.

  “He wasn’t meant to help them,” said Jane. “He wasn’t meant to help them pull it off—he was meant to put them off.”

  She was coming to it now, at last, thought Butler. But, whatever ‘it’ was, at least she wasn’t directly involved in it.

  He concealed his overwhelming relief behind a frown.

  Jane frowned back at him. “They’re planning to murder someone, Father,” she said.

  Colonel Butler closed the door of his library behind him, shutting out the sound of the girls’ argument over which of them was going to drive the Mini, and went over to the huge mock-Tudor window.

  One of Sally’s horses was cropping the grass right up against the white fence on the other side of the forecourt. As he stared at it, the animal seemed to sense his presence and looked up towards the house incuriously for a moment. Then it lowered its head again and the grass-tearing sound re-started. On the far side of the paddock, the other two horses were similarly engaged in their endless breakfast-lunch-tea-dinner, and beyond them, the field by the road was dotted with cows which at this distance reminded him of Brittain’s farm toys with which the girls had played when they were little and untroublesome.

  Butler turned his back on the scene. It had served its purpose, because now he no longer wished to commit a murder of his own, both to pre-empt that which was allegedly in train and to punish the would-be murderers for the ruination of the quiet weekend with his girls, to which he had been looking forward.

  Now commonsense and reason, disciplined by duty, had reasserted themselves. There were even books there on the shelves to remind him—there, high up on the left—that the rebellious American colonies had been supposedly lost because of the devotion of King George III’s ministers to carefree weekends … and there, two shelves down and to the right, that ‘lose not an hour’ had been Horatio Nelson’s watchword.

  His eye travelled along the shelves, down to the other end of the long room: and there, also, was the gazetteer in which he could pinpoint the village of Duntisbury Royal, to direct him in turn to the right inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map from the shelf below, on which he could pin the gazetteer’s point exactly, if necessary.

  The Mini’s engine roared outside. (Whichever of them was at the wheel, she would take the drive too fast, and the corner at the entrance too dangerously, with all the reckless immortality of youth, untainted by experience and protected only by youth’s split-second reflexes.)

  (David Audley had the experience, and to spare, and a rare quality of intuition. But he also had his blind spots, and he no longer had the reflexes for field-work, unescorted.)

  He listened to the engine-note, gauging the car’s exact position until it finally snarled away in the distance, on the main road, holding his breath until then. (There was nothing he could do about the girls: they were their own women now, for better or for worse, and he could only come to them when they called him. But there was a great deal he could do—and must do—about David Audley.)

  If necessary.

  No certainty animated him yet, as he moved round the big desk, and sat down behind it, and reached decisively for the red telephone, with its array of buttons. Others, more gifted with that wild Fifth Sense than he, might be able to move from the known via the unknowable to the most likely. But he could only advance by experience and the map references of information received.

  He lifted the red phone and pressed two of the buttons simultaneously. Two red eyes lit up, one steady, one blinking insistently. He watched them until they both turned green.

  “Duty officer? I wish to speak with Chief Inspector Andrew. When you get him, patch him through to me on this line, please.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Thank you.”

  He replaced the receiver, so that one of the green eyes went out while the other turned red again, holding the scrambled line. Then he reached out, almost reluctantly, for the other phone—the ordinary humdrum Telecom instrument, beloved of Diana, Sally and Jane to his great quarterly cost, and dialled his required number, for all to hear who wanted to hear.

  “The Old House.”

  The childish treble rendered his next question superfluous. “Cathy—are either of your parents home?” It pained Colonel Butler’s super-ego that he was glad his little god-daughter had been closest to the phone.

  “Uncle Jack! Yes—Mummy is.” The breathlessness of her evident pleasure turned the pain into a wound. “Are you coming to my birthday party next Saturday?”

  “Your birthday party?” Butler feigned surprise. “Have you got another birthday? How many birthdays a year do you have? Are you like the Queen? Is this your official birthday—or your real birthday? You can’t expect me to keep track of all your different birthdays—I’m much too busy for that, young lady!”

  “But I haven’t—” The child caught herself a second too late, birthday-excitement betraying intelligence “—if you’re too busy … then that’s your hard luck—you don’t get any of the cake—and you don’t come to the dinner afterwards, with Paul and Elizabeth, and pineapple Malakoff and Muscat de Beaumes de Venise in the funny bottle—okay?” Cathy added her special birthday pudding and its attendant wine to her other favourite grown-ups like a visiting Russian nobleman and his exquisite French mistress, joining in the game. “But Daddy’s not here, anyway—he’s in Dorset, digging up Romans and looking at tanks … but Mummy’s here, if you want her—”

  Conflicting emotions warred in Butler’s breast: his much-loved and super-intelligent god-daughter had given him what he wanted—Audley was in Dorset, digging up Romans and looking at tanks, whatever that meant, if it was true—even though he hadn’t asked for that information, and though he had intended to play foully to get it, hoping it would come from her mother without his asking for it—

  “Here’s Mummy, anyway—” The rest was lost in the surrender of the receiver, from daughter to mother.

  “Jack?” Faith Audley was matter-of-fact, as always. “If you want David, he’s not here.” Then the ever-defensive a
nd slightly-disapproving wife asserted herself. “But he’s on leave, as you well know.”

  “In Dorset, digging up Romans and tanks?” Butler chuckled deceitfully at her.

  “Yes.” The matter-of-fact disapproval crystallised itself. “You can get him at Duntisbury Royal 326—but only if you have to, Jack.”

  Duntisbury Royal 326

  “I haven’t the slightest interest in Duntisbury whatever— and even less in Romans and tanks, Faith dear—” What had Romans and tanks got to do with Duntisbury Royal and General Maxwell, lately deceased? “—and least of all with your husband … I am at home, attempting to enjoy my weekend, if you can believe that … I was merely calling about next weekend, as a matter of fact. Your daughter’s birthday, remember?”

  There was a pause. Butler’s eye ranged over his desk, and as it did so one of the blank red eyes on the console of the red telephone started to blink at him redly, off and on, on and off, to inform him that the duty officer was back on that line, holding Chief Inspector Andrew for him, from another ruined weekend somewhere.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. Of course! But …” It started as an apology, then the voice became edged with doubt “… he is on leave, isn’t he?”

  There it was, thought Butler with bleak sympathy: the bomber pilot’s wife’s question, redolent with uncertainty about the actual whereabouts of her husband, who could be drinking in the Mess with his crew this morning, but then Flying Tonight: that, even after a dozen years’ safe landings, and in spite of his age and seniority, was the nightmare with which Faith Audley lived, on her pillow in the dark, in her washing-up bowl in the light, and everywhere she went in-between when he was out of her sight, and nothing would change that.

  “If he isn’t, it’s news to me.” That at least was true! “I was just calling to confirm next weekend—” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, covering the untruth of a phone-call he would not have needed to make if Jane had not spoken to him with the truth of what he had already done in honour of his goddaughter’s birthday “—I’ve got her a first edition of Kipling’s collected poems, and a signed copy of Little Wars, plus something for her bottom-drawer, which she can put into her savings account.”