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  “Whereas you think it was a case of in vino veritas?”

  “If he thought he had become a traitor he wouldn’t value himself very highly, I think that.”

  Audley bowed his head. “Very well, then. And now we come to McLachlan of the fast reflexes—what about him?”

  “Hah—hmm. I asked the Department to run a report on him. I only have what he—and the others—told me.”

  “Peter has the report and we’ll hear from him in a moment. It’s your opinion I want. You think highly of him?”

  “If we don’t expect too much of him we can use him.”

  “Too much? Is he a weakling then?”

  “Far from it. He’s a tough boy.” Butler searched for the image of Daniel McLachlan as he was and found only the image of what he would be in a few years’ time: there was a submerged hardness about the boy—a maturity beneath the immaturity—which in a subaltern would make him as a man worth the watching, a man for responsibility soon, and beyond that eventual command far above the regiment. Far was the operative word for Dan McLachlan: he was at the beginning of a career which stretched out of Butler’s sight. Sir Geoffrey Hobson, who ought to know a flier when he saw one, subaltern or scholar, had forecast as much: he should go far, unless—

  That ‘unless’ was the stumbling block. In war there was always the necessary risk to be taken when the McLachlans were blooded, the risk of the malevolent chance bullet that missed all the empty heads and spilled the brains out of the bright one. But this wasn’t McLachlan’s war.

  Or was it?

  “He’s quick and he’s bright,” said Butler, coming to an instant decision. “He’ll do right enough.”

  If Hobson’s theory held water, then it was McLachlan’s war more than anyone’s: he was already in the front-line.

  “If there’s anything in the South African angle he’s just the chap for us,” Richardson said eagerly. “With his background he’s a dead cert to be in on anything that’s cooked up.”

  Audley nodded slowly, still eyeing Butler. “How does that sound to you, Jack?”

  “He’s no firebrand politically. But—aye, if he could be stirred up by anything it’d be that. From what he said I’d say he feels pretty deeply about it. It’s mixed up with the bad time his father gave him too.”

  “Does that check out with you, Peter?”

  “On the nose!” Richardson’s dark curls bobbed. “Old man McLachlan sounds a right swine for anyone’s money. Inherited a farm at Fort Hawes, somewhere down south in Mashonaland—enough to keep him in whiskey and comfort for a few years. The boy was OK while his mother was alive, but after she died he was packed off as a boarder down to the Orange Free State, to the J. P. Malan Government School in Eenperdedorp, no less—real backwoods agricultural area that’s 99 per cent Afrikaans. What our South African section describes as ‘the absolute bloody end’.”

  “Not the place for Mama’s little liberal boy?”

  “You can say that again! Of course, the section hasn’t any first-hand account of life in Eenperdedorp—reading between the lines I reckon it took ‘em an hour or two to find the ruddy place on the map. But McLachlan junior must have been a stout chap to survive it in one mental piece.” Richardson turned towards Butler. “Is he much of a sportsman?”

  “He was in the running for a rugby blue at Oxford last year.”

  “Ah! Well that might account for it. It seems they’ll put up with quite a lot even from a bleddy Ingelsman if he can do that sort of thing.” Richardson grinned at Audley, his spirits effervescent again. “As a rugger type he ought to be right up your street, David. But as he let friend Zoshchenko pass himself off as his old pal Boozy Smith, I don’t see how he can be quite as sharp as Colonel Butler here says he is.”

  “Smith wasn’t his old pal,” snapped Butler. “He was two years McLachlan’s senior at Eden Hall, and they hadn’t seen each other for maybe four or five years. You said yourself they’d matched him up reasonably accurately.”

  “True enough,” Richardson conceded. “And Smith must have been pretty confident to go out of his way to meet him again—so I guess we’re both right after all.”

  “Never mind Smith, Peter,” said Audley. “If McLachlan’s father was such a bastard, how did the boy get out of Africa to Oxford?”

  “The suggestion is that they made some sort of deal—that’s according to the Notting Hill Gate crammer who prepared him for his Oxford scholarship papers. You see, the mother left what money she had to her son, not to the husband, and by the time the boy was through school his father’d begun to run short again.”

  “So it seems young Daniel bought his freedom with half of his inheritance, or something like that. What he told the crammer was he’d left his old man enough cash to drink himself to death in maybe three or four years, and bloody good riddance!” Richardson shook his head disapprovingly. “Not a happy family, the McLachlans.”

  No, thought Butler, but it would account for the coldness with which young McLachlan was already calculating life. He had taken its first blows young and learnt how to bargain his way from survival to success. There might very well be an element of calculation in the act of volunteering to help avenge his friend Smith—he might have seen and grasped the chance of proving his discretion in matters of state security.

  If it were so, then the calculation was a shrewd one, even shrewder than McLachlan himself might have guessed. For if all went well, he would start his career with some influential men in his debt, Audley and Sir Frederick among them. And even if things went badly (which seemed a likelier probability at the moment) it would not count against him; he would be safely marked as a youngster ready to do his duty.

  “Hmm … “ Audley looked into space meditatively. “He certainly sounds as though he’s possessed of the right credentials for us. It’s a wonder Fred hasn’t got him on the ‘possible’ list already. In fact—“

  A sharp knock at the door cut him off in mid-sentence. He looked at his watch and then at Butler before continuing.

  “Time’s getting on. Just how much does McLachlan know?”

  “Nothing of value. I let him believe that Smith’s accident wasn’t accidental. He already suspected something wasn’t quite right up here from the warning hints Hobson’s been dropping.”

  “Hah! So the Master has been talking.” Audley nodded to himself. “I rather thought he lacked confidence in us.”

  “But the boy doesn’t know who’s behind it—fascists or communists. He simply thinks Smith found out more than was healthy.”

  The knocking was repeated, more insistently.

  “WAIT!” Audley commanded. “So what did you tell him to do?”

  “He’ll pretend he’s willing to take part in any mischief that’s brewing. If there is, then he’ll let me know at once.”

  “Good. We’ll let that ride then.” Audley stood up abruptly. “All right, Masters! Come in!”

  The door banged open and the young Signals officer entered the harness room apologetically.

  “Sir—I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re cutting it a bit fine if we’re to get the—ah—“ he looked at Butler “—ah— Colonel to Caw Gap for the exchange.”

  Audley regarded the subaltern distantly. “I’ve been watching the time, and we’re still inside it. Is everything all right?”

  “On the crag, sir? Oh, yes!” Masters began eagerly. “Lion Two met Unicorn at Lodham Slack, and Tweedledum observed them from the rocks above—it’s marked ‘Green Slack’ there on my map, and the ground’s nicely broken, so he didn’t have much trouble.”

  “And he got through to Tweedledee?”

  “Straight away, and he sounded jolly excited. And then Tweedledee called up Red Queen.”

  “Ah! Now that’s what I wanted to hear. Have you got Red Queen pinpointed now?”

  “Yes, sir. He was just about where we’d estimated him, on the reverse slope. He’s driving a dark green Morris 1800 Mark II S, registration SOU 8436, which means he can outr
un anything we’ve got here. But Sergeant Steele says he hasn’t tumbled to us yet—“

  “Has he got the pictures?”

  “We’re processing the first lot now, sir. Steele reckoned there were perhaps four really good ones—“

  “Don’t stand there, man!” Audley cut him short. “Go and put some ginger into ‘em. I want Colonel—I want Lion One to see ‘em. Go on—and then you can run him to Caw Gap. Go on with you!”

  He shooshed Masters out like a governess driving a small boy, then turned back to face them with a smile of triumph on his face.

  “If Steele says they’re good, then they damn well are good,” he said, rubbing his hands. “I saw a set he got in the Shankhill Road in Belfast last year—a couple of top IRA Provisionals from Dublin—taken in far worse conditions than today. Peter, you must remind me after this is over to see if we can’t get Sergeant Steele for ourselves. He’s wasted in the army.”

  “Who are you expecting?” Butler asked.

  “I’m not expecting anyone in particular. There had to be a third man somewhere at hand, I knew that—Korbel is too low in the apparat and Protopopov hasn’t been here long enough to know his way around.”

  “Adashev?”

  “It could be. Logically perhaps it ought to be, because we’re not supposed to know about him.”

  Butler watched Audley gloomily. It was pathetic to see the fellow so happy over so little: Audley, whose reputation was founded on the popular superstition that he always knew better than anyone else what was really happening, even though he rarely bothered to tell anyone what he knew until it was all over.

  Butler had always disliked him for that, more than for anything else. Now he found he disliked him somewhat less, but the discovery was not in the least reassuring: the staked goat in the clearing ought to be able to hope that the tiger-hunter in the tree above him knew what he was going to do.

  “I don’t like it, whoever it is,” Butler growled. “I don’t like the way they’re acting—it doesn’t have the right feel about it.”

  “What do you mean, the feel of it?” Richardson asked. “You are the bait, and they’ve swallowed you. So maybe they’re a bit thick this time—“

  “And maybe they’re not so thick—let’s suppose that for a change, for God’s sake! We’ve laid all this on for them.” He gestured towards the door. “Wireless trucks and mobile dark rooms, and—and bloody lions and unicorns! But how much have they laid on for us?”

  “That’s the whole point, surely,” Richardson persisted equably. “They’ve laid something on right enough. What they’re trying to do is to make sure we don’t mess it up for them. So that means they have to take a risk—you were right about that, and I was maybe a bit simple. But the object of bringing you into the act was to make them react—and now you’re grumbling because that’s what they’ve done.”

  The boy was right, however galling it might be, Butler told himself. It was a familiar enough situation in all conscience: each side knew its own intentions, but was in the dark about its enemy’s plans to frustrate them. So as usual they were groping in that darkness for each other.

  And to that groping Richardson brought all the confidence of his youth and quickness, while he himself was weighed down by the knowledge of his own mortality and by his girls in Reigate, his immortality.

  They were too often in his mind when he was working nowadays, those girls. There had been a time when he could forget them quite easily from dawn to dusk, in the knowledge that there was a stack of bright postcards ready written which were unfailingly dispatched to them at intervals from different parts of the British Isles when he was away from home. Sunny postcards and rainy postcards—this time it would be the turn of the cold, windy ones from Edinburgh. And this time on his way home he would buy them each a box of Edinburgh rock to give substance to the deceit.

  Richardson was staring at him, but before he could concede the argument the door banged open again—in his eagerness Masters had wholly forgotten his manners as well as his training.

  “Three, sir!” Masters thrust the limp prints towards Audley. “Three beauties—all side-face, but clear as a bell. There are several others, but these are the ones that count.”

  Audley took the pictures carefully, studying each in silence before passing one to Richardson and another to Butler.

  The face of the Red Queen was framed in unfocussed blurs —the objects through which Steele had aimed the camera— so that the effect was rather like a Victorian daguerreotype: a young-old face, plump and round still, acne-scarred, but the stubble and the curly hair was grey and the gold-framed spectacles added an old-fashioned schoolmasterish touch. A beautiful photograph—Audley was right about the Sergeant’s special talent.

  He looked up from the picture to Audley.

  “I don’t know him,” he said.

  They both looked at Richardson.

  “Search me.” Richardson’s shoulders lifted. “I don’t know him either. It certainly isn’t Adashev—he’s a whole lot prettier.”

  “So!” whispered Audley. “So indeed!”

  “So what?” Butler barked.

  “So I know him.” Audley smiled. “You might say he worked for me once.”

  “He worked for you?”

  “Oh, only indirectly.” He looked at them, the shadow of the smile still on his lips. “But don’t worry: you haven’t lost your memories. It was out in the Middle East I knew him— knew of him, to be exact. We had a nasty little job up the Gulf, just about the time we were pulling out of Aden. The Chinese were all set to move into a place called Mina al Khasab, and we weren’t in any state to do anything to stop them—for reasons I won’t go into.”

  “But it didn’t suit the Russians either, as it happened. Trouble they’d got elsewhere, with the Israelis on the Canal, the Egyptians screaming for missile units, without pulling us back. So—we gave it to them on a plate. And they organised what used to be called in the bad old NKVD days a ‘Mobile Group’—crude, but efficient, because you can still get away with being crude on the Gulf. Or you could then, anyway.”

  For a moment he was far away, and then suddenly both he and the smile came back simultaneously.

  “What it means is that you and Richardson go on as scheduled. But I shall have to leave you for a time to do some checking of my own—quite unavoidable. All you have to do is to keep your ear to the ground. And make sure Daniel McLachlan doesn’t go running out of your sight, too.”

  “But who the hell is he?” Richardson waved his photograph despairingly.

  “Alek?”

  “Alek who?”

  “All I knew was plain Alek. But Alek isn’t a ‘who’—he’s a ‘what’. He’s what they used to call in the Mobile Groups a ‘marksman’. With a rifle he’s as sure as the wrath of God.”

  XV

  THE KNOT IN his regimental tie was far too small, Butler decided, checking his reflection in the big gilt-framed mirror in the hallway. Too small, too tight and too old-fashioned. It was a knot that pinned him in status and time as surely as did the tie itself, probably more surely since there wouldn’t be many here at Castleshields who would recognise the magenta and yellow stripes of the 143rd.

  He worried the knot with a few savage little tugs. It was no use, of course: the tie was old and this was the only way it permitted itself to be tied now. And in any case it didn’t matter, for the face above it was equally old-fashioned and regimental. Only the eyes mocked and betrayed the face’s brutality, reminding him of the sole virtues his old grandma had found in it: “Ah’ll say this f t’ little lad—‘is years be close to ‘is ‘ead an’ ‘e’s got ‘is mother’s eyen … “

  He abandoned the tie in disgust and continued towards the noise of the common room. This, it seemed, was the first convivial hour of the day, the beginning of a carefully graduated loosening of tongues and nerves designed to prepare these young mental athletes for record-breaking assaults on the summer’s exam papers. Modern educationists would probably c
ondemn it, but Gracey and Hobson were unashamedly old-fashioned, and they had this system of theirs all worked out and laid on, despite the superficial casualness of the place.

  He paused beside the open window at the end of the passage, outside the common room door. The volume of noise coming through indicated that the tea was doing its job—and from the noise coming from the lawn outside the game of croquet there fulfilled much the same function.

  It was a fiercely played game, judging by the powerful swing of the player directly in front of the window—more a golf stroke than a croquet tap; players and onlookers scattered and the striker shook the fair hair out of his eyes and waved his mallet in triumph.

  McLachlan.

  Instantly Butler craned his neck out of the window to take in the whole setting of the game.

  The grey sky still had a wind-driven look about it, but in the protection of the great L-shaped house with the fir tree plantation on its third side the croquet lawn seemed to draw the last heat from the westering sun. Away to the south the land fell away for a mile or more and he could glimpse the smooth, dull expanse of the lake. Beyond and above lay the rolling skyline of the crags; here they were north of the wall, in the ancient no-man’s-land of the Picts.

  “It’s all right, Colonel. I’ve got my eye on him,” a quiet voice murmured. For a moment a shadow blocked out the sun and then Richardson sauntered past along the terrace, a tea cup nursed to his chest.

  Butler grunted to himself and drew his head back inside the house. It was well enough to risk one’s own precious skin and perfectly proper to hazard a subordinate like Richardson, who should know the score. But it was a hard thing to send an innocent into danger, and a risky thing too, no matter how well the thing could be justified.

  Audley didn’t care, because he’d done it before and because deep down he liked doing it. And Richardson didn’t care because as far as Butler could see Richardson didn’t care very deeply about anything: life was just a joke to him, because it had never been a struggle.