Soldier No More Read online

  “Just do what the book says, Mr Cox.”

  “Thank you, madam,” said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.

  “Captain Roche, Sir Eustace,” said Mrs Harlin.

  Sir Eustace—Mr Avery that was, of the RIP sub-committee—Sir Eustace was standing behind a huge desk, half-framed by the great gilded frame of the portrait-of-a-naval-officer behind him.

  Roche thought: That must be the Sargent picture of ‘Blinker’ Hall and if Avery’s got that picture for his room then Bill Ballance and Jean-Paul are both right about the new group.

  “David—“

  Roche tore himself away from Admiral Hall’s basilisk eye. It was Thain, the only man in Personnel Recruitment who had thought well of him after he’d fluffed half the tests in training.

  “David—let me introduce you—Sir Eustace, this is David Roche, about whom you’ve been hearing so much these last few days.”

  Christ! Thain had come up in the world since PRT days, to be in this company, overlooked by Admiral Hall himself. But that at least accounted for his own presence, even if ‘hearing so much’ could hardly ring true. Since his PRT debacle he’d been little more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in spite of Thain’s approval. So there really wasn’t so much to hear about.

  “Sir Eustace,” he mumbled. But he had to do better than that—here— now—by God! He had to shine—

  “Colonel Clinton, David—“

  Clinton was another new face, but the name rang faint warning bells: one glance at Colonel Clinton was two glances too many—the thought of Colonel Clinton hearing so much these last few days was blood-curdling.

  Clinton smiled a terrible non-smile, far worse than Jean-Paul’s bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck grin. “Roche.”

  “Sir!” Roche did his best to make the word stand to attention for him.

  “And St. John Latimer, of course,” concluded Thain.

  St. John—Sin-jun—Latimer was very young, and podgy with it; and languid, like an Oxford undergraduate who had strayed into the wrong party but was too idle to do anything about it.

  “Latimer,” said Roche.

  “St.John Latimer,” corrected St.John Latimer, swaying at Roche’s faux pas.

  Latimer—plain Latimer, damn it—was standing to the right and slightly behind Colonel Clinton, in the creature-to-the-Duke position, so that was what he might very well be since he was too young to be here by right of experience and seniority. But he might also be some sort of catalyst, introduced to sting a reaction from the provincial and dull Captain Roche.

  “Is that so?” Well, if they wanted a reaction, at least let it be a controlled one. “Jolly good!”

  Like all good catalysts, Latimer showed no sign of change at this controlled Roche-reaction, he didn’t seem even to have heard it.

  “Yes …” It was Thain who produced the reaction, and it was a decidedly uneasy one. “Yes—well, I must be off now—“ he gave Roche a glance which was more charged with doubt than encouragement, like a gladiatorial trainer delivering a novice into the arena “—subject to confirmation and—ah—mutual agreement, David, you will be transferred from the Paris station to Sir Eustace’s care … on a temporary basis, of course—“

  Sale or return—as the liquor store off-licence would have put it. Or suck-it-and-see, as Roche’s old squadron sergeant-major more accurately would have pronounced.

  “—Colonel Clinton will fill you in on the details.”

  The figure of speech was unfortunate after the memory of SSM Lark had been conjured up in Roche’s memory: to be filled in at Shaiba Barracks involved the scattering of blood and teeth in all directions.

  “Sir Eustace—Colonel—“ Thain looked at Latimer, who was examining the pattern on the carpet, and decided against including him in the general farewell. Perhaps he hadn’t come up in the world, or not as far as the present company and venue had suggested; perhaps he had only been present to complete the formality of pushing the doomed Roche out on to the arena’s sunlit ellipse of sand for the killing.

  “Thank you, Malcolm. You’ve been a great help,” said Sir Eustace with the easy insincerity of long experience. “I’m sorry you have to go …”

  He wasn’t sorry. And, what was worse, Thain wasn’t sorry either.

  “David—nice to see you again,” Thain nodded.

  He wasn’t sorry because he expected Roche to fluff it again. And maybe that had also been what Jean-Paul expected, except the possible benefit of his not fluffing it outweighed the attendant risk. What was more, his— Roche’s—very presence here, win or lose, increased his value as a bargaining counter on the board. After this, for Jean-Paul, he would be worth trading in for some other advantage as he had never been before. He was on the way to becoming a blue chip.

  And that made his own betrayal of Jean-Paul even better sense, as a pre-emptive strike, to mix the very latest Israeli jargon with that of the Stock Exchange. More than ever, he had to do well now simply to keep ahead of them—both of them—until he could bargain on his own account.

  The door closed behind Thain.

  “Now then, David—sit down—“ Sir Eustace indicated the central chair in front of his enormous desk.

  Roche sat down.

  There was a file on Sir Eustace’s blotter, which he pushed forward into the sphere of influence within Roche’s reach.

  Roche made no attempt to pick up the file, let alone touch it, never mind open it. Instinct was in charge now, preventing him from breaking the taboos.

  “We’ve got another David for you, in there,” said Sir Eustace.

  “Audley,” said Colonel Clinton. “David Audley.”

  “David Longsdon Audley,” said St.John Latimer.

  “We want him,” said Clinton.

  Roche stared at him. “He’s one of theirs?”

  “He’s one of nobody’s,” said Clinton. “But we want him to work for us. And you are going to get him for us, Roche.”

  II

  “IT’LL TAKE ABOUT an hour, maybe,” said the mechanic.

  Roche frowned. “An hour?”

  “I’m on the pumps as well, see …” The mechanic sized him up. “And then I got to find the right parts.”

  “What parts?” Roche hadn’t intended to argue the toss, but with what he’d most carefully done to the engine not an hour before, half an hour’s work was a generous estimate, and no replacements were necessary. “What parts?”

  “Ah … well …” The mechanic blinked uneasily. “There’s this bracket, for a start—“ he reached into the engine and wrenched fiercely at something out of sight “—you didn’t ought to go round with it like that, it’ll let you down when you’re miles from anywhere.” He shook his head. “An’ it’s a fiddling old job, too … maybe three-quarters of an hour, say?”

  Roche realised that he had miscalculated. He had concentrated on the necessary time element, but had not allowed for time being someone else’s profit.

  “You’ve got the parts?” he capitulated.

  “Oh yes, sir.” The mechanic relaxed. “It’s only I dunno where to put my hand on ‘em right off. But I’ve got ‘em, don’t you worry.”

  “Hmm …” Roche looked at his watch. “It’s simply that I’ve this important business engagement and I don’t want to be too late. So if you can hurry it up as best you can …” He left the possibility of extra reward implicit in the plea.

  “Half-hour, sir,” said the mechanic cheerfully, recognising a sucker. “There ain’t much traffic today, so it should be quiet on the pumps, with a bit of luck.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “ ‘Elp yourself, sir. In the office—“

  Roche dialled the number he’d been given, and a woman answered.

  “Roche for Major Stocker …” Stocker was new to him too. They were all new to him, apart from Thain, who was unlikely to appear again. It was like making a fresh start, in a new job, as a new person … w
ith a new personality which he could adjust according to need as he went along.

  “Roche here, sir. The car they gave me has broken down—I’m phoning from a garage just outside Leatherhead—yes, sir, Leatherhead—“ he didn’t say which side, but even if the Major offered to come and collect him the distance was nicely calculated.

  The Major didn’t offer.

  “The man says three-quarters of an hour, but I don’t think it’ll be as much, sir … Yes, sir, I’ll ginger him up—I’ll be with you as soon as I can, sir.”

  He didn’t like the sound of the Major. But then he had never liked the sound of majors, who always seemed to exist in a limbo, either embittered with the failure of their hopes or hungry for the promotion almost within their grasp.

  Still, that was a good job well done: he had his half-hour now, and a generous half-hour too, all correct and accounted for and accountable, and above all innocent. The rest depended on others, and on their correct observance of the routine.

  He sauntered across the forecourt towards the workshop feeling reassured, if not happy. It might all be routine, and the Comrades were always sticklers for routine. Yet the effort involved even in this routine, and the precautions they had taken in communicating with him, made him feel important, and more important than he had felt for years. And if the feeling was a secret one, like the rich man’s pleasure in stolen masterpieces in his hidden gallery, then that was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of it.

  The mechanic withdrew his head from the raised bonnet and bobbed encouragingly at him.

  “Found the right bracket, sir—just the job!” He plunged his head back quickly, before Roche could question him or God could strike him down for bearing false witness against the British Motor Corporation.

  Roche nodded uselessly at his back, and continued his aimless saunter, back on to the forecourt, slowly past the pumps, to the very edge of the highway.

  He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn’t given up smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn’t like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was always cautioning him to give up drinking, or almost, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-Paul, only to himself; and although the new Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance … and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he had in mind for himself.

  Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a Daily Sketch in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.

  Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view—maybe art imitating reality imitating art. And it was time to find out.

  He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.

  Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.

  Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.

  If he was wrong about the man, it didn’t matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn’t worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche’s naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

  Nothing to fear. He had told them where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that lunportant to them—or even if it wasn’t—they could be relied on to oversee their security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to soldier on until they were ready to try again.

  He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they didn’t make contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about Audley, David Longsdon, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—merely annoying. So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at churches was one of his hobbies.

  Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.

  The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.

  If they were here, then still nothing to fear. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was “This is your big chance, David”—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else. And so it was, by God!

  “Mr Roche.”

  At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the Daily Sketch reader outside.

  “I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me ‘Johnnie’, Mr Roche—and I shall call you David.”

  The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked ‘Johnnie’ into ‘Ivan’; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol horseman riding through the man’s ancestry at about the same time as this church had been built.

  “Johnnie,” Roche acknowledged the identification.

  “How long do we have?” The voice didn’t fit the face, it was too accent-less, any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who wouldn’t have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.

  “About half an hour.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Guildford. I’m due to meet a man named Stocker.”

  “Major Stocker?”

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  “Why?” Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn’t think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.

  “He’s going to brief me on this man Audley.”

  “He’s your controller—Stocker?”

  “No—I don’t know … I’m to report back to Colonel Clinton when—“

  “Clinton?” The eyes and the face remained expressionless, but the voice moved. “Frederick Clinton?”

  “Yes—?”

  “He was there? At your meeting—on the Eighth F
loor?”

  “Yes. But—“

  “And you are to report back to him—not Avery? Or Latimer?” Genghis Khan pressed the question at him like a spear. “Clinton?”

  “Yes.” It was disturbing to see his own fears reflected in Genghis Khan’s evident concern. “Is that bad?”

  “You… are to report back to…Clinton… about this man Audley?”

  Audley, David Longsdon. Born, St. Elizabeth’s Nursing Home, Guildford, 10.2.25. Only son of Major Nigel Alexander George Audley (deceased), and Kathleen Ann, nee Longsdon (deceased), of The Old House, Steeple Horley, Sussex…

  He didn’t even bloody well seem interested in Audley, David Longsdon, damn it!

  “Yes. What about Clinton?”

  “This man Audley, then—“ Genghis Khan ignored the question again, as though it hadn’t been asked. But it was no good thinking of him as Genghis Khan, and letting him ride all over David Roche as though over a helpless Muscovite peasant: he had to be Johnnie, and he had to be resisted.

  “What about Clinton?”

  The pebble-eyes bored into him. “He frightened you, did he?”

  “If he did?”

  “He should. He’s good, is Clinton.”

  “He frightens you, does he?”

  “No. But he does interest me.” The Slav features failed to register the insult. “He is an interesting man, I think.”

  “He interests me even more. Because I have to report back to him, and you don’t.”

  Genghis Khan, refusing to be Johnnie, inclined his head fractionally to accept the truth of that. “Maybe later. But not yet—not now. You tell me about Audley now, David.”

  That was probably as much as he could expect to get about Clinton, decided Roche, since Clinton was evidently a wild card in the pack. But Audley was another matter.

  “I thought you would be able to tell me about him.”

  Genghis Khan almost looked disappointed, as near as he was able to indicate any emotion.