Gunner Kelly Read online

  “Jack—” Her voice trailed off, and he heard her despatch Cathy out of ear-shot “—Jack, that’s much too generous—”

  “Nonsense. She’s my god-child. Just don’t tell David that I’ve called—” Butler’s eye strayed from the winking red light on the red phone to the gazetteer, wedged blue-black in its shelf: Duntisbury Royal—Faith and Jane both agreed on that, and Cathy had added Dorset—and Romans, and tanks—

  What the hell was David Audley up to, adding General Maxwell to all that—?

  And murder—?

  Faith was mouthing good-mannered platitudes at him and he had to get rid of her gently and circumspectly: Diana was well, and enjoying her job … and Sally’s horses were well, and appeared to be enjoying what Sally made them do … and Jane was enjoying Law at Bristol University, together with all the other things that Law students did—

  In the end he managed to extricate himself from her convincingly, if without the luxury of honour, and returned to the red phone.

  “Hullo, sir,” said Andrew cheerfully. “Trouble?”

  “Wait.” There was a red eye still, next to the green one. “Thank you, Duty Officer—that will be all.”

  The red eye closed abruptly.

  “Andrew.” Weekend or not, Andrew had been accessible. And—what was better than availability—Andrew could be trusted. “Maxwell. Major-General Maxwell—in the newspapers recently … and there was a routine circular on him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  There was only a fractional pause. “Not a lot, sir. You want the Anti-Terrorist Squad for him.”

  “If I wanted them I’d be talking to them.”

  Another pause: as a detective-inspector, Andrew had been one of the brightest sparks in the Special Branch, but it still sometimes took a moment for him to adjust to the eccentric politics of Colonel Butler’s service. “Right, sir.”

  “Very well. It was a car bomb in Bournemouth, about a fortnight ago, as I recall. We accused the IRA Proves or the INLA, with the odds on the INLA. They both denied responsibility. Go on from there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Only the very slightest South London whine betrayed Andrew’s Rotherhithe origins: for some people he turned it on full, complete with rhyming slang, as a tactical device, but with Colonel Butler he never tried it on, it was the Honours graduate in Law who spoke. “It was an Irish bomb, undoubtedly, Inertia-type—pop the parcel under the seat, and just withdraw the pin … Good for soft, unsuspecting targets: off they go, and the first time they slow down up they go … It’s one they’ve used before—not too difficult to put together when you know how, but not crude.”

  “Professional?”

  “Professional—yes … to the extent that there are three known training-schools in the Soviet bloc which include it in their syllabuses—schools which handle foreign trainees …one in East Germany, one in Czechoslovakia … and the KGB one, naturally.”

  “So it doesn’t have to be Irish?”

  “It doesn’t have to be—no. Except that they’re the only ones who’ve used similar devices, so far …”

  “Yes?” Was that uncertainty in the man’s voice?

  “Yes … well, there is an element of doubt on this one, it’s true. In fact… doubt is about all there is, apparently.”

  “Doubt?”

  “About it being Irish, sir.”

  Butler’s heart sank. David Audley was not an Irish specialist, and notoriously avoided any involvement with the Irish problems which came their way even peripherally. He had pinned most of his hopes on that, he realised now.

  “Why?” And why, come to that, was Andrew so well-informed about the case, in spite of that ‘not a lot’ disclaimer?

  “No motive, sir.”

  “Since when did the INLA need a motive?”

  “No connection, then. General Maxwell never served in Ulster—he wasn’t remotely Irish … and he was ten years into his retirement—more than ten years … before this lot of Irish ‘troubles’, anyway. The nearest thing he had to an Irish connection was his servant, Kelly, and he hardly qualifies as Irish within the meaning of the word, any more than Maxwell himself does—did.”

  “Kelly?” Butler could recall no mention of any Kelly, either in the newspapers or in the intelligence circular. But as a name Kelly was Irish of the Irish.

  “Gunner Kelly.” Andrew emphasised the rank. “Irish for the first seventeen years of his life, until he joined up at Larkhill in 1938, like his father before him—father went through the ‘14-’18—DCM at Loos, bar at Ypres … son went through the ‘39-’45—Dunkirk, Tunisia, Italy—Maxwell’s regiment … Peace-time soldiering afterwards, then drove a taxi up north somewhere… . Came back to the General about four years ago—totally devoted to him… . What they say is, if he’d known the General’s name was on a bomb, he’d have scratched it out and put his own in its place, most likely.”

  Butler thought for a moment. “Could he have been the target, then—a lackey of the bloody British?”

  “A 60-year-old lackey?” Andrew echoed the idea scornfully.

  “Since when has the INLA been choosy?” It was too feeble though—even for the INLA. Much too thin.

  “If they’re going to start blowing up all the Kellys, then they’ll need a nuclear bomb, not a pound of jelly under the seat …sir.” Andrew paused. “But they did check him out. Because it’s true he could have gone up with the General—in fact, if the General hadn’t sent him off on some errand, he would have gone up… . He was going to drive, but the old boy wanted a parcel of books collected—all above board and kosher, in front of witnesses… . But that isn’t the point, you see.”

  “So what is the point?” For Kelly to be a non-starter there had to be a point, of course: that was implicit in Del Andrew’s scorn.

  “They weren’t expecting this bomb, sir—neither the Provos nor the INLA—that’s the fact of it, the word is … It caught them both with their trousers down—right down by their ankles.”

  “How so?” ‘Not a lot’ was indeed turning out to be quite a lot. So now he also needed to know why Andrew had done so much more than read the circular on General Maxwell’s assassination.

  “Well, sir … after the Hyde Park bombing there was a lot of recrimination—killing Brits was one thing, but killing horses was another—that was bad medicine on the other side of the Atlantic … like, in the cowboy films you can have the Indians bite the dust, and the cowboys, and the horse-soldiers … but you can’t have the horses with their guts blown out, or trying to stand up on three legs—that’s the unacceptable face of terrorism … And if there’s one thing the Irish themselves are soft on, it’s horses—they can put their shirt on them, and lose it, but they can’t blow six-inch nails into them and then stroll away whistling about Donegal and Connemara, like nothing has happened. … So we got more mileage out of those pictures of dead horses, and Sefton in his stable, than we did from Airey Neave and Earl Mountbatten being killed, you see.”

  “Yes.” That was another plus for Chief Inspector Andrew: he saw life as it was, not as it ought to be, with a hot heart but a cool head.

  “Yes. So they weren’t planning anything for the rest of this summer. And after the heat had gone off, when things had settled down a bit, they started to reorganise quietly—both the Provos and the INLA … But then, out of the blue, General Maxwell’s bomb goes up in the middle of Bournemouth, and all hell breaks loose again when they weren’t battened down—as they would have been if they’d planned it, sir.”

  Butler waited, although he already knew what the point was now, from the recent circulars which had passed across his desk as a matter of routine.

  “So as a result the Squad picked up three of them who were out in the open—the Provo bagman who was delivering funds in London, and the girl who was setting up that new safe house … and the INLA hit-man—a real bad bastard we’ve been after for a long time, that the West Germans wanted too.” Andrew paused. “W
hich our contacts in Dublin and Belfast both confirm—that the boyos there would like to get their hands on whoever did for the General quite as much as we would, and probably even more.”

  That made sense … even if the sense it made was the mad and bad illogical sense of terrorism the world over, thought Butler bleakly. But now was the moment for a straight question.

  “So how did you come into this, Andrew?”

  This time it was a longer pause. “Ah … I heard a whisper, sir—that it maybe wasn’t an Irish job at all … But the bomb was a pro job, like I said.” Pause. “And there was that paper of Wing-Commander Roskill’s on bombs, not long ago … So I thought this one might end up on our plate—on your plate, sir …” Modesty disarmed Chief Inspector Andrew “… and I dropped in on the squad anyway, to talk about old times … just in case.”

  Intelligent anticipation: another plus for the man. “Could you go down there again?” Pause.

  “No, sir. If I go down there again … they’re much too fly for that: they’ll know it won’t be just curiosity this time—especially as they’re looking for someone to take it off their hands. They’ve already tried to unload it on the Dorset locals.”

  “With what result?” If Audley hadn’t been involved, Butler might have smiled: the experience was not unknown to him of having intractable problems left at his official door like unwanted babies, lusty and demanding.

  “The Chief down there—the Chief Constable—he wouldn’t have it. And quite right, too!” Andrew grunted sympathetically. “He said there was no one on his patch who could set a bomb like that—and if there had been they’d never have set it under the old General. He was the last person anyone would want to blow up. So it had to be political.”

  “And you go along with that, do you?”

  “I don’t go along with anything … sir,” replied Andrew cautiously. “I don’t know enough about it—this was just what I picked up over a few beers. But they certainly didn’t have any local prospects down there with any sort of motive, never mind the know-how, apparently.”

  “You mean he had no known enemies down there?”

  “That’s right. In fact… no known enemies anywhere, would be more accurate. He was a decent old stick—‘much-loved local figure’, as they say … only this time that was the exact truth: they couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have a good word for him. What the local vicar said, was that he disproved the parable about the rich man having difficulty getting into heaven: he’d get through the eye of the needle with plenty of room on both sides.”

  “He was rich?”

  “Rolling in it. Landed money, too—the sort that’s gone through the roof the last few years.”

  “Next-of-kin?” He knew part of the answer to that already. But there might be more.

  “Just one grand-daughter—who adored him. And most of his wealth was already in trust for her anyway, apart from that. Nobody stands to gain from his death, if that’s what you’re after. Most people think they lost by it.” Andrew sniffed at him down the line. “Too good to be true, eh?”

  “I said no such thing!” snapped Butler. One thing the years had convinced him of was the existence of pure evil. Fortunately, whatever the hell-fire preachers thought, it was very rare; but its corollary was the existence of pure good, though unfortunately that was even more rare.

  “Well, that’s what some of my old mates down the nick thought, having had some disillusioning experiences in that direction.” Andrew chuckled. “This turned out to be equally disillusioning in its way—for them, actually.”

  “How so?” Butler frowned.

  “He wasn’t as good as he seemed, was General Maxwell— ‘Squire’ Maxwell—Major-General Herbert George Maxwell, CBE, DSO, MC … and Grade VII on the piano, and heaven only knows what else … and clever with it, sir.”

  Andrew was clever too, Butler noted. But maybe he needed slapping down. “Don’t waste my time, Chief Inspector. Get to the point.”

  “Yes, sir. He wasn’t as good as he seemed—if anything he was better.”

  “Better?”

  “Yes, sir. No secret mistresses. No strange perversions. All they dug up was a lot of good he was doing by stealth—and a lot of good he’d done in the past, that no one had known about.” Andrew allowed an edge of incredulity into his voice. “You know, there was even a letter—there were two letters—from his official enemies… . They intercepted all the letters to his grand-daughter—”

  “His enemies?”

  “His official ones. One was from some branch of the Hunt Saboteurs—in his younger days he was a great one for foxhunting … there’s a Duntisbury Chase Hunt—saying how courteous he’d always been to them, even while he was outsmarting them … and how he’d always listened to them, and stopped the locals beating them up, and so on—that was one of the letters.”

  Good Gracious! thought Butler.

  “And the other was from Germany, with money for a wreath—from some German Old Comrades’ associations, from the war… . They’d read about his death in the papers, and they remembered how well he’d behaved—how he’d looked after their wounded somewhere, and cheered them up by congratulating them on making a great fight of it, and fighting cleanly, and all that—which they’d never forgotten.”

  Colonel Butler stared at his bookshelves, and remembered his own war, and the waste and the pity of it. And he could remember a German too, as they had remembered an Englishman—

  “Sir?”

  Colonel Butler blinked at his shelves, snapping free from the memories which for a moment—or for more than a moment—had taken him outside time, into a past which had had no future.

  “Yes.” Only the present mattered now. “Right!” And the first question to be resolved concerned Chief Inspector Andrew himself. “Now … you tell me exactly why you became so interested in General Maxwell, Chief Inspector. Right?”

  “Yes, sir.” Andrew was satisfactorily ready for the question. “Well… I heard this whisper—like I told you—that it wasn’t an Irish job … what I heard was that they didn’t know what the hell it was, to be exact, sir.” The returned emphasis came back to Butler smugly, like a cool return to a hard service. “So I had this feeling that we might get it, you know.”

  That was a good and complete answer, even though it ignored the importance of their current preoccupation with the Cheltenham centre.

  Or did it? The possibility that someone else might know about David Audley, never mind Jane Butler, chilled Butler.

  “Just that? Nothing more?”

  “No, sir. Nothing more.” The reply was stoutly delivered, with a very slight colouring of outrage at the suggestion that its honesty had been considered questionable.

  “Right.” Butler refused to let himself be embarrassed. Loyalty in exchange for trust, trust in return for loyalty, was what he gave and expected to receive in his appointments, but in this wicked world nothing was certain. Yet in this officer’s case the risk was worth taking. “You’re busy setting up the Cheltenham operation at this moment. I want you to drop that for twenty-four hours.”

  “Yes, sir.” The faint red of outrage changed to the amber of expectation.

  “I want you to get back in there somehow and pick up everything you can steal on General Maxwell, Chief Inspector.” Butler studied his books, looking for something which might inspire him, and felt belittled by them: there were so many clever men in those volumes, much more clever than he was, but many of them had come unstuck in spite of that. “And I mean steal—and I don’t want anyone to know that you’ve done it. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was understood—but could it be done? Butler waited while the Chief Inspector reconsidered the chances of doing successfully what he had already said he couldn’t do. “There is a way that I can maybe do that—indirectly.”

  “All right.” Butler didn’t want to know about the nuts and bolts of the deception. But it was time now to give the carrot of trust to make the whip-lash of loyalty
more bearable. And he had already burnt his boats, in any case! “You know where David Audley is at this moment?”

  That stopped the Chief Inspector in his tracks, by God!

  “He’s on leave, sir. Writing another book. Do you want him?”

  “No!” Butler recognised his mistake in that instant: it was no good blaming Jane—it was no good blaming Audley, even—no good telling himself that Audley ought to have behaved differently; that he ought to have behaved better, with his age, and his seniority, and experience, and intelligence—ought to have behaved best, not merely better.

  David Audley had been born into the wrong age—that was what the man himself thought, and had never pretended otherwise: he always saw himself as a prince-bishop from his beloved middle ages, mediating between God and man, and meddling happily in the affairs of both to their discomfort.

  Bletchley Park in the war would have suited Audley best— better than the Middle Ages, even—when he would have been safely bowed down not only by the responsibility and the importance and the challenge of the work, but also by the sheer volume of it, so that he wouldn’t have had either the time or the energy to get up to mischief.

  That had been his mistake: he had let Audley free-wheel for too long, while Cheltenham matured—the cleverest man he knew, whom he (of all people) should know was also most capable of behaving irresponsibly when he was bored with lack of responsibility. Jane had only lit that fuse—and perhaps he was lucky that Jane (of all people) had lit it!

  Chief Inspector Andrew hadn’t said a word this time. He had waited patiently for the next bomb-shell, with his head down.

  “Audley’s in Duntisbury Royal at the moment. I don’t want him disturbed until I know what’s happening down there.”

  More silence from the other end of the line. It would be fascinating to know what Andrew thought of Audley: whether he knew enough yet to be as certain as Butler himself was that it could not be murder that Audley was contemplating. It would be something very different.