The Old Vengeful Read online

  “Oh, yes?” The reason for that apologetic cast was on its way.

  “Master Oliver St John Latimer wanted this job, you see—“ Audley’s unlovely features became unlovelier “… he’s consumed by this strange compulsion to shine for our masters … or our mistress, in this instance … to shine—and he has a strong competitive instinct.”

  What Oliver St John Latimer had was ambition: with the noble, honest and decent Colonel Butler as acting-Director of Research and Development, the Director’s job was up for grabs, and Oliver St John Latimer wanted it.

  “And you don’t want to shine, of course?” said Mitchell nastily. “You don’t want to be the next Director?”

  “I don’t give a stuff, either way—no.” Audley was impervious to nastiness. “I don’t want to be the next Director, or the Duke of Plaza-Toro, or the Kabaka of Buganda, or the Akond of Swat—Jack Butler is a perfectly good Director—his overwhelming qualification for the title is that he doesn’t want it, if you ask me.”

  The irony about that, thought Mitchell, was that it was probably true. And the other and greater irony was that Jack Butler favoured Audley for the very same reason, so rumour had it.

  “But, as it happens, Latimer would have made a dog’s breakfast of this one—Butler’s quite right, as usual—Latimer’s a high IQ plodder: he can set up an operation much better than I can, but he’s no good at this sort of thing—this is something else, I suspect.”

  So Audley had won … if this particular prize could be called winning. “So where are the complications, for God’s sake, David?”

  “Season your impatience for a moment—the complication is that you can’t take this one single-handed, and Master Latimer is as artful as a cartload of monkeys—“

  “I’ve not got a partner?” Mitchell’s chest expanded: Frances had been his partner, and Frances slept in a little country churchyard now—now and forever. “I don’t want a bloody partner—“

  “Not a partner. More … a bodyguard—a driver … someone to watch your back and do the chores, Paul. And he’ll be good at all those things, I assure you.”

  He—?

  “No!”

  “Yes. Do you know a man named Aske? Humphrey Aske?”

  “Aske?” Mitchell ran the tapes. There was a new Special Branch man taking over from Cox—Andrews—Andrew … and an Agnew, who was half-French and a Hull University Law graduate … Aske—Christ!—Aske!

  “He’s a—he’s a—oh, shit—“ Mitchell ran out of words, into outrage.

  “Odd? Queer? Gay?” Audley raised an eyebrow. “A cupcake? I heard that word recently, from one of our newer recruits—you know of Humphrey Aske, then?”

  “David—no, for God’s sake—“

  “I might have known you’d know him. You always know too much, Paul.”

  “I’ve only seen him a couple of times—I’ve talked to him once—“

  “But once was enough? Tchk, tchk!” Audley tutted at him. “Prejudice is a terrible thing! And since it takes all sorts to make a world—and particularly our world—has it never occurred to you how useful the Askes of this world can be, once we’ve stopped trying to sweep them under the carpet?” He gazed at Mitchell. “What was he doing, when you encountered him?”

  “He was poncing around in records.” Mitchell recalled his incredulity from that encounter.

  “In the Balkan Section? He has been covering one of their embassies—probably the Bulgarian … the old Bulgarian heresy?” Audley was at his most maddening. “That’s one of Master Latimer’s areas of activity, and he’s one of Latimer’s creatures. That’s why we’ve got him now—or you have.”

  More incredulity. “Latimer isn’t—?”

  “No. Latimer isn’t. Latimer is neither homo nor hetero, so far as I can observe. He is merely and unfortunately very smart, in this instance. So I’m afraid you have Aske as your back-up.”

  “Why not Bannen? I like him.”

  “Because Bannen doesn’t have the right qualifications. Aske does—and Latimer has kindly made him available, because he wants to know what I’m up to … and Jack Butler is being obstinately fair-minded, because Aske needs more field experience at the sharp end, to qualify for promotion.” Audley gave Mitchell a wicked look. “But you don’t need to be nice to him, or to let him into your confidence. He’s just there to hew wood and draw water for you, and to die for you if he has to.”

  That was altogether too close to the bone: there was no answer to that, only another pang of remembrance.

  “Now … the project.” Audley dismissed the complication of Aske as though the truth had exorcised it. “It was Project Vengeful—and the Vengeful was in English, not Cyrillic, so there are no semantic or etymological arguments about ‘avenger’, or ‘vengeance’, or ‘vindictive’, even though they were all Royal Navy ships in their time too.”

  Loftus of the ‘Vengeful’, thought Mitchell automatically. But that was two-thirds of a lifetime ago—

  “There were twelve Vengefuls—the twelfth was a submarine in ‘44, but that’s being attended to elsewhere, and you don’t need to worry about it. You’ve drawn the other eleven, and I want you to eliminate them … or not, as the case may be.”

  Ridiculous, thought Mitchell.

  “And Loftus was the expert on all of them. So you will start with him,” said Audley. “Or, seeing that he’s dead, you must start with his daughter—even if it means playing mixed hockey!”

  The hero’s daughter

  I

  ELIZABETH ONLY BECAME fully aware of the handsome young man after an intermediate sequence of more casual emotions.

  There was a Victorian mirror on the bric-a-brac stall, opposite her own bookstall on the other side of the gangway—a big, ugly old thing, mahogany-framed, solid as an old battleship and as unsaleable—it had been on the same stall in the previous sale, and hadn’t sold that time either, and wasn’t going to sell this time at half the price. But now he was looking into it, and he was looking at her.

  The first time, she had put it down to accident—to the accidental adjustment of the mirror; then, when she noticed that he was still looking at her, she put it down to brief curiosity—to the discovery that he could stare into it without being noticed, without knowing that she had observed his curiosity. But the third time, after she had moved down her stall and had then come back to her original position beside the cash-box … then he was still there, and she began to wonder what it was that held his attention.

  It couldn’t be the cash-box, because his suit fitted too well for that—a nice summer suit that was never straight off the peg—that suit was too good for what there was in her cash-box, and so was his haircut; even the three young tearaways from Leigh Park, whom she had observed casing the stalls earlier, had dismissed the box at a glance as containing too much silver and too few notes.

  But then it couldn’t be her, either—that was equally unlikely, to the point of being ridiculous, even though she now represented a very great number of banknotes—because he couldn’t know that…

  Or could he?

  She began to day-dream pleasurably along the lines which dear old Mr Lovell at the solicitors’ had sketched obliquely, even though he was unaware of the half of her good fortune. It still amused her, the new deference—not plain Elizabeth any more, now that she was an esteemed client and not Father’s messenger; she was still plain Elizabeth herself, but in Lovell, Cole & Lovell she had become Miss Loftus; and dear old Mr Lovell, who had never been unkind to her, had tied himself into a Gordian Knot trying to warn her of the temptations and pitfalls waiting to ambuscade her, now that she was a woman of modest wealth and property, and all alone.

  There were people, he said—

  (He was still watching her: she was sure of that now!)

  There were people—old Mr Lovell couldn’t bring himself to say men, just as he would not have dreamed of telling her that she was no oil painting even if she now had a golden frame—there were people who might come to her
with … ideas … She must be careful of the company she kept, careful of new friends who might not be friends at all, careful …

  Some hope! thought Elizabeth: it was she herself who had all the ideas—even silly ideas about impossibly good-looking young men who watched her surreptitiously in mirrors at church fetes—mysterious young men like the hero in that Mills and Boon romance she’d confiscated from Angela McManners last term, when Angela should have been deep in Lockyer’s Habsburg and Bourbon Europe for her A-level.

  And there, as a reminder of that episode, was huge Mrs McManners herself, just a few yards down the stall, browsing on the ckeapest and tattiest paperbacks—it would never do to let her catch Miss Loftus ogling young men!

  “I’ll take these two,” said Mrs McManners. “Both from the 10p box, dear.”

  “Thank you, Mrs McManners,” said Elizabeth sweetly. “Purity’s Passion and The Sultan’s Concubine—shall I wrap them for you?”

  “They’re for my daughter—she’s very fond of history.” Mrs McManners hastily stuffed her purchases into her basket. “I must fly, dear.”

  The idea of fifteen stone flying diverted Elizabeth momentarily as she dropped the coins in the box. Then a hand came into the corner of her vision, its index finger running up the titles towards her.

  “And I’m very fond of history too.” The finger came to rest on one of Elizabeth’s own contributions to her stall. “From Trafalgar to Navarino: The Lost Legacy—by Commander Hugh Loftus, VC, RN.”

  But it didn’t say all that on the dark blue spine, thought Elizabeth. There was only From Trafalgar to Navarino and Hugh Loftus picked out in gold there.

  They looked at each other directly for the first time, eye to eye, but whatever she let slip in her expression she could see no sign of any acknowledgement in his that they had already scrutinised each other in the mirror.

  “How much would that be, then?” he inquired.

  In second thoughts, now that he was right here in front of her, he not only looked ten years older, but Elizabeth had the strangest feeling that she had seen him before somewhere; not before during this same afternoon, in some unregistered fleeting glance in the crowd, but before somewhere else … On a television screen? In a newspaper?

  He leaned forward slightly towards her. “How much?”

  With an effort Elizabeth shook herself free of second thoughts. “I’m sorry—it’s £1 .50,” she said, fumbling the book out of the line.

  “£1 .50?” He smiled at her.

  “It’s a mint copy.” It was one of Father’s author’s copies in fact. “And it’s in aid of the church tower restoration fund, so I don’t think it’s too expensive.”

  “I wasn’t questioning the price, Miss Loftus.” He took the book from her and opened it at the fly-leaf. “I was just hoping that it would be signed—I see that it isn’t… but it’s cheap at the price, anyway. Only … it would have been even cheaper with a signature—at the price—wouldn’t it?” He smiled again.

  Elizabeth swallowed. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got a signed copy.”

  “No matter. Perhaps you could sign it instead?” He produced a pen, and held the book open for her.

  “I don’t see …” Elizabeth trailed off.

  “The next best thing, Miss Loftus. If not the hero himself, then the hero’s daughter. I would have preferred The Dover Patrol—more my period. But this will do very well.”

  He was an academic, she ought to have guessed that even though she hadn’t started to try to guess what he was: the mixture of confidence and that slightly degage air, plus the Oxbridge voice, were clues enough. Yet, if he was an academic TV or newspaper personality, she still couldn’t place him. But there was an easy way of getting round that now.

  She accepted the pen and the book. “To whom shall I inscribe it?”

  “Paul Mitchell—‘Mitchell’ with the usual ‘t’.”

  That didn’t help matters, even though something still nagged at the back of her mind.

  “ ‘To Paul Mitchell from Elizabeth Loftus’—there, for what it’s worth.” She smiled back at him. “That’s the first time I’ve ever signed a book. But I don’t think I’ve added to its value.”

  “On the contrary.” He studied the inscription for a moment, then looked at her appraisingly. “For such a unique collector’s item … shall we say £5?”

  Elizabeth’s worst suspicions were pleasurably encouraged. Fortuné hunters were out of date, and in any case the details of her official inheritance—let alone the rest of it all—couldn’t possibly be common knowledge. But he was up to something, that was certain.

  “The price is £1.50, Mr Mitchell. I couldn’t possibly accept more.” She took his £5 note.

  “Mint condition?” He raised the book between them. “The going price in Blackwell’s at Oxford for this is £9.95, you know.”

  So he had done his homework, but if he was trying to pick her up that was to be expected.

  “It’s still £1.50.” That “Blackwell’s at Oxford” was a nice touch, well-calculated to arouse her happiest memories, if that was what was intended. Yet, once identified for what it was, it armoured her against him. “Do you mind taking your change mostly in silver?”

  “I don’t want any change.” Her intransigence was beginning to unsettle him. “Keep it for the church tower.”

  She began to count out the 10p pieces from her cash-box. “You can give them all to the Vicar’s wife, then—she’s sitting just down the end there, and she’ll give you raffle tickets in exchange. You might win a bottle of whisky or an LP. And even if you don’t win anything, she’ll give you a pamphlet on the history of the church for free … seeing as you’re interested in history, Mr Mitchell.”

  That, and £3.50 in 10p pieces, ought to damp down his ambitions, whatever they were. And besides, there was a customer waiting further up the table.

  She pushed the piles of coins towards him. “Excuse me …”

  But when she had completed the sale of One Hundred Great Lives and Civilisation on Trial, at 40p the pair, he was still there with his coins untouched, looking just a little forlorn.

  “Yes, Mr Mitchell?” Elizabeth’s conscience tweaked her slightly. It was after all a church sale, and she had not given him the benefit of any doubt whatsoever, in all Christian charity.

  He spread his hands. “Miss Loftus, I confess … I was also hoping to buy a little of your time.”

  So at least they had come to the crunch on her terms, thought Elizabeth smugly. “My time?”

  “Just that. At least, to start with … I want to put a proposition to you.”

  Elizabeth’s hackles rose. She looked up the table for more customers, but there were none, so she could hardly set any price on her time, which patently had no value here and now.

  “A proposition?” She could hear the harshness in her voice which was normally reserved for scholarship girls who allowed their precocious sex lives to intrude into the work which had to be done, and who then attempted to fob her off with transparent excuses. “What proposition?”

  At least he had picked up the danger signal: she could see that by the set of the jaw. “It’s about your father, Miss Loftus. It relates to him.”

  As it invariably did, the direct mention of her father froze Elizabeth, activating her public face to assume its sorrowing-daughter expression.

  “I was very sorry to learn of his death.”

  There was no earthly reason why he should be very sorry, if he was a stranger. And if he wasn’t a stranger—it occurred to Elizabeth that it was quite possible, if this young man was an academic of some sort, that he might have met Father somewhere, sometime. But then, if he had, it seemed to be unlikely that Father would have endeared himself sufficiently to make him “very sorry”. So, either way, it was merely a conventional insincerity preparing the way for the proposition.

  “I read the obituary in The Times.”

  Everyone had done that—

  … after a long illness bravely
borne … although badly wounded, refused medical attention… continued to direct the engagement… successful conclusion of a brilliantly-handled operation …

  Well, The Times always did its duty by VCs, and, with the original citation to go on, the panegyrist’s work had been largely done for him in advance, for all that it mattered now, which was no more than any other seawrack from those sunken E-boats of his.

  But everyone had read it anyway, even Mr Paul Mitchell.

  “That’s why I’m here, really … Perhaps … perhaps I’m rather rushing in—so soon after … But I’m hoping that you won’t think so.”

  What Elizabeth was thinking was that her silence was getting to him. And that, if it had merely been a matter of small talk about her irreplaceable loss, would have been fine with her. But with his proposition as yet unproposed it called for a bit of encouragement.

  She indicated the stacks of 10p pieces. “You’ve purchased some of my time, Mr Mitchell—remember?”

  He gave her a curious look, almost as though she had given him an inkling of the true face behind the mask.

  “Yes, of course … Well, the obituary stated that at the time of his death he was engaged in writing a history of HMS Vengeful, the destroyer he commanded in the Channel fight in ‘42. Is that what he was doing?”

  The question was delivered with a slight frown, indicating doubt if not actual disbelief. And that was interesting because of all the facts recorded in the obituary, other than the long illness bravely borne, this was the one The Times had got wrong. And—not doubt, but certainty—Mr Paul Mitchell knew as much. But how?

  “Why d’you want to know, Mr Mitchell? Does it matter what he was writing?”

  He shook his head vaguely. “I seem to remember … about two or three years ago … he wrote a letter to The Times trying to get in touch with anyone who served on the previous HMS Vengeful—the one which fought at Jutland in 1916, or any next-of-kin with letters and suchlike … And he also explained then that he was writing a book about all the ships of that name which had ever served with the navy—am I right?”