The Alamut Ambush Read online

  ‘I don’t wonder at it. But what the hell has Llewelyn been doing? They must have some idea.’

  ‘Stocker said they hadn’t the faintest idea, but things must be bad for them to come crawling to Audley like this when they both hate his guts. But Audley’s got a big reputation for puzzle-solving, especially after the business with that Russian last year. And he’s got some juicy Middle Eastern contacts of his own, remember.’

  ‘He swears he hasn’t now.’

  ‘So he says. All I know is they want him and they want him badly. And now it’s up to you to get him – you and Nellie No-tits in there. She’s probably giving him hell now. I hope she is; it’ll make it easier for you.’

  Roskill knew he had to make allowances for Butler’s blind spot, but there was a point at which allowances became pusillanimity.

  ‘You really are a bugger sometimes, aren’t you? And not even a very clever one this time, as it happens. You want to watch it, Jack. It might become a habit – making mistakes about women.’

  Butler’s heavy shoulders slumped and then stiffened again, and Roskill was aware too late that he had hit harder than he intended. The man had children – three little snub-nosed, red-haired, miniature Butlers, all female – but he had never once mentioned a wife. Roskill had never thought to ask about that, and now he never could.

  ‘Aye, that could happen.’ Butler stared into the darkness before meeting Roskill’s gaze. ‘But this is strictly business. They say she has a well-developed social conscience and they aim to catch at him through it. And through you too, Hugh – through you.’

  Now there was regret in his voice, and a curious echo of that lost Lancashire accent. If there was anything more to be got out of Butler, now was the time.

  ‘And that was the only reason why I’m involved ?’

  A shake of the head. ‘I don’t know. They know you got Jenkins into the service, that you know his family. And Audley likes you, they know that too. But I think there was something else behind that… You went to Israel before your leave, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was nothing. I only met a few of their pilots — I saw their tame Sukhoi 7 and some Mig 21 modifications, and we talked about the SAMs. It was pure routine.’

  Butler nodded. ‘I don’t know, then. But they want you sure enough. There’s a briefing tomorrow at eleven thirty – not at the office, either. Officially you’re at Snettisham. The meeting’s set up at the Queensway Hotel, just off Bloornsbury Square. Room 104. You and Audley, if you can swing it. You and your beard, anyway.’

  Butler eased himself into the driver’s seat of his Rover. He reached for the ignition.

  ‘And Hugh – I’m sorry about young Jenkins. It was bloody bad luck, pure bloody bad luck.’

  Alan Jenkins was already a little unreal, thought Roskill sadly. Already one of the absent friends, fixed forevermore in the past tense, merely to be remembered and regretted. Not even a ghost, but just another of the shades, like Harry. It was appalling how quickly death could be accepted. But then he’d never really known Alan as he had kiiown Harry: the age gap had been small enough, yet impassable.

  Yet it was civil of Butler to regret him, a decent gesture after their recent passage of words. It called for a civil answer.

  ‘If it hadn’t been him it would have been some other poor devil.’

  ‘But it was doubly bad luck for him, though. It should have been Maitland. He was the one on call.’

  ‘Why wasn’t it Maitland, then?’

  Butler switched on the engine. ‘Act of God, the insurance companies would call it. That gale last night brought half a tree across Maitland’s telephone wires – he lives out of London, down East Grinstead way. They couldn’t get through to him. The other two chaps were out of town and Jenkins had just come back. He was the second stand-by. Pure bad luck.’

  He looked up at Roskill as he reached for the transmission selector. ‘But if you want to get your own back on bad luck, Hugh – get Audley. It’s as simple as that.’

  Roskill watched the Rover’s tail-lights down the drive until the beech hedge cut them off. So Jenkins’s death had been doubly accidental – a useless, cruelly coincidental death. He turned despondently towards the porch. It would take more than coincidence to make Audley change his mind.

  He stopped with his hand on the iron latch, staring at. the weathered oak. Were those the original adze marks on it? Pure bad luck . , . yet perhaps Audley would be more interested in bad luck, at that – he had once said that he was not a great believer in luck, either good or bad: he maintained it was very often something a man received according to his deserts…

  There was a germ of an idea there: a trick and a deception, certainly, but also an idea. Yet it would have to be good to catch a suspicious-minded Audley; it must do better than fit the facts, but must carry its own inner conviction. It must intrigue him. It must –

  Roskill caught his breath, still gripping the latch. It did fit the facts. It fitted them so perfectly that it ceased to be a deception even as he tested it in his own mind.

  God! It was like carrying a supposedly forged masterpiece to an art dealer, only to realise at the last moment that the forgery bore the irrefutable marks of authenticity on it!

  He started as the latch moved under his hand and the door opened suddenly in his face. A gust of warm air hit him.

  ‘Hugh! What are you doing standing out in the cold? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’

  Roskill stared at her. ‘I think I have, Faith – I think I have.’

  Faith put her hand on his arm. ‘It’s Alan Jenkins, isn’t it? I’m so sorry – I can’t quite believe it even now.’

  ‘I’m going to ask David to help me. Do you mind?’

  ‘Mind? Of course I don’t! I think it’s his duty to help you.’

  ‘Even after Jack Butler tried to use the way you felt as a lever?’

  Faith shook her head ruefully. ‘I’m used to that sort of thing now. It’s the way they think – always the indirect way. It’s the way David himself thinks half the time. He can’t help it. You’re the only normal one among them I believe, Hugh. And don’t you dare change.’

  Roskill looked at the floor in confusion, thinking guiltily of what he was planning, and worse still why it would appeal to her dear David. Really, she deserved better than tliis…

  ‘But it’s no use, Hugh. He won’t help you. It isn’t that he doesn’t care about people, because I know he does. But they hurt his pride terribly when they took him off the Middle East – he won’t admit it, and he laughs it off like he did this evening. But it mattered to him much more than he pretends because he really cared about the Jews and the Arabs. He had real friends among them, on both sides – that was why he was so good at his job. And I think he really hates that man Llewelyn. So it won’t be any use – I haven’t even tried to convince him, so I know you won’t be able to.’

  A pity Butler was on his way back to town; it was a speech he ought to have heard. And if true a valuable insight equally into Audley’s mind: beneath that air of calculation the man might even be committed to some sort of humanitarian ideal. He might have a dream like Llewelyn’s in fact. Perhaps that was what really fed his dislike of the man.

  So much the better now, Roskill thought.

  ‘I must try nevertheless, Faith,’ he said gently. ‘Because there’s something I believe we’ve all overlooked up to now.’

  Audley was sitting back, waiting for him, his final refusal cut and dried and ready for use.

  ‘It’s “no” to you, too, Hugh. I’m sorry, but I’m like that American statesman who said that if he was nominated for the presidency he wouldn’t stand, and if he was chosen he wouldn’t sit. So have another drink and don’t bother to ask me.’

  Roskill smiled. It seemed so clear now: it was like saying that the earth was round. But they had all been so busy thinking of themselves that no one had noticed it – except Faith, who had spoken the truth because she hadn’t understood at all.

/>   ‘Hugh, what’s the matter?’ Audley was looking at him, perplexed. ‘Have I said something amusing?’

  The matter was that it was amusing: Llewelyn scared enough to pocket his pride and try to manoeuvre a man he disliked – and who hated him – into rescuing him. And all for nothing.

  That was what Audley would surrender to: not the tragedy of it, but the savage joke.

  ‘The bomb in the Princess, David – it wasn’t for Llewelyn at all. It was for Jenkins. Just for Jenkins.’

  II

  ROSKILL LAY ON a groundsheet in the soaking bracken, watching Mrs. Maitland shepherd her children into her Volkswagen half a mile below him.

  The eight o’clock sun was low enough behind him for the forward slope of the ridge to be a textbook observation position, which made him feel slightly foolish. If she had walked right by him she still wouldn’t have known him from Adam: she was a perfectly innocent housewife running her kids to school. But Audley had been insistent on every precaution being taken; nothing must be allowed to alert anyone about what they were actually doing.

  He watched the little car bump down the rutted track to the metalled road, and then along the curve of the road for a mile until it disappeared from view. Then he backtracked to the exact point where the Maitland’s telephone wires left the main cable, their more slender poles striding across the open field to the cottage and the farm beyond.

  He adjusted the binoculars fractionally, scanned the area for the umpteenth time and saw nothing fresh. In all probability there was nothing, or if there had been it had by now been hopelessly obliterated by the repair men whose tramplings were evident even at this distance. At best it was a long shot, but everything had to start somewhere, and this was that inescapable starting place.

  He replaced the binoculars in their leather case and folded the groundsheet. Mrs. Maitland would not return for at least forty minutes; Maitland himself had been gone half an hour and would be on his train by now. It was time to move.

  He searched the landscape once more, wondering as he did so if he was duplicating the actions of an earlier observer. Then he turned and retraced his way to where the Triumph was parked among the pines. He unlocked the boot and replaced the binoculars and the sheet. Shutting it he glimpsed his reflection in the shining cellulose, distorted and wholly unrecognisable. In leather jerkin, flat cap and gumboots – and with the ludicrous beard – he wasn’t quite sure what he resembled. An itinerant Basque revolutionary, perhaps, but hardly a pirate and certainly not a stray G.P.O. linesman. Equally, however, not his elegant self.

  He stumped off heavily down the hillside. The break in the weather hadn’t lasted, thank God; the ground was still wet, but was drying fast, which was just as well if there was going to be much crawling about like this. It was no use telling himself that he was a country boy, born and bred, for over recent years he had become half-naturalised into a townsman. Not that this little bit of heath, field and woodland was true countryside; anything close to London as this was little better than the enclosures at Regent’s Park Zoo, open space preserved to give the human animals the illusion of a natural setting.

  He shook his head. If there was nothing left to show that the wires had been deliberately brought down, should he invent evidence to keep Audley happy? It had been what he had originally intended, after all, before the possible truth of it had dawned on him. Yet Audley had taken little convincing; it was almost as though he’d welcomed the idea, despite his previous intransigence. Perhaps deep down he knew that he wasn’t quite big enough to turn Llewelyn away.

  Or perhaps it was simply that the logic of Roskill’s solution made such crude proof unnecessary. It was there in the events themselves: every step of the car theft and booby-trapping had been marked by the same contradictory cleverness and stupidity. But the cleverness and the stupidity had both been carefully calculated to lead directly to the removal of the fatal bug by an expert – and by one expert in particular.

  The Jenkins Gambit, Audley had called it: the best way to kill a food taster is by poisoning his master’s dish — it looks like an occupational hazard!

  And it had so very nearly worked, too. With someone as important as Llewelyn menaced, Jenkins was almost certain to be overlooked. The assassins could not reasonably have expected anyone like Roskill, with a personal commitment to sharpen his perception, to appear on the scene – and even he had only stumbled on the more likely truth by accident.

  The only real flaw in their planning was the telephone wire: the coincidence that had alerted Roskill. They should have waited until Jenkins came on duty by normal routine — unless for some reason they were unable to wait, in which case it was not a flaw, but a calculated risk…

  At least finding the place had been easy enough. Although the repair men had worked on the other side of the hedge their vehicles had chewed up the roadside verge, deeply rutting the debris of the previous summer. He had had no difficulty spotting it on his early morning reconnaissance drive along the road, in the half-light.

  The tree itself, contrary to Butler’s report, had not come down – it merely leaned drunkenly away from the road, ten degrees out of true. The damage had been done by a huge dead limb which appeared to have snapped off two-thirds of the way up. Falling in the field it had brought down Maitland’s wires and conveniently left the main cable intact.

  Roskill squelched his way over the ruined verge. The elm had grown up on the far side of a deep roadside ditch; with its one-sided root system – he could see the stumps of roots which had been severed when the ditch had last been cleaned out – it was hardly surprising that it had started to fall away from the road. Elms, he remembered, were notoriously unstable at the best of times.

  He peered up at the new scar high up on the trunk where the limb had been ripped away. There were no signs of saw marks, nor any tell-tale sawdust scattering at the base either. It looked depressingly like a natural break, the result of the extra pressure when the tree canted over.

  Not for the first time he felt a touch of doubt chilling his beautiful theory. It would be damned embarrassing if he was forced to double-cross Audley into making a fool of Llewelyn. Worse, if Jenkins wasn’t the target it was Audley who would be made to look the fool, and Audley would be a nasty enemy to make in the department.

  He launched himself clumsily across the ditch, throwing his weight forward and embracing the elm as the soft earth crumbled under him.

  The grass on the other side of the hedge was also torn and trampled and sprinkled with legitimate sawdust, where the fallen limb had been cut up into manageable sections and stacked. It was good burning wood, too, dead but not rotten.

  Dead, but not rotten: there was something maybe not quite right about that. He ran his eye up the trunk again: it was odd how the great branch hadn’t fallen in a line with the tree itself – yet if it had done so it would almost certainly have missed Maitland’s wires. As it was it had peeled off towards the left, almost as though it had been … pulled.

  Pulled! He kicked himself mentally for missing the simplest method of all: hitch a cable to the dead branch and pull obliquely. It was not only the obvious way but virtually the only way, and he’d been a monumental idiot not to see it at once.

  And yet it would take immense strength to do it – not only bringing down the branch, but also very nearly the tree itself. It would take more than manpower to do that.

  He looked up at the elm again, then down to the torn turf, trying to gauge the likely direction from which the pulling had been done. It had to be out in the field to the left of the wires.

  He moved carefully away from the hedge, searching the ground intently. It had been dry on that night, and for some days before, but this land was low lying. Further out in the field there were tussocks of coarse marsh grass. It would never be less than damp here.

  And there they were!

  Hardly more than twenty yards from the elm, and somewhat closer to the hedge than he had expected, were four symmetrical bruises
in the grass where the wheels had spun for a moment before winning their tug-of-war with the branch.

  Roskill’s pulse beat with excitement: four tyre marks made the evidence conclusive. The act of dragging a heavy object on the ground would have produced deeper rear wheel marks and shallower front ones, even if the vehicle was four-wheel drive. But the downward pull had equalised the forces at work — another few yards, indeed, and it would have been the front tyres which would have dug deeper into the ground. These marks were exactly those which a Land-Rover would make in the act of sabotaging the line, unremarkable in themselves but irrefutable evidence in context.

  He experienced a curious mixture of gratification and anger. His logic – and Audley’s confidence – was vindicated by this tattered piece of low-grade pasture. Here Maitland had been deliberately cut off, so that Jenkins should keep the appointment.

  Somebody knew too bloody much about the technical section, that was certain. And somebody knew too much about Llewelyn’s movements.

  Roskill felt for the camera in his webbing haversack. And somebody, he thought grimly, had come unstuck, nevertheless.

  III

  AUDLEY WAS STANDING on the pavement in Grosvenor Gardens, ten yards from its junction with Buckingham Palace Road, which was precisely where he had said he would be, to the yard.

  In fact, thought Roskill, he looked rather like a solitary, oversized waxwork which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud’s and then abandoned to become a pedestrian obstacle: he stood unmoving, engrossed in a dull-looking, stiff-covered mag;azine, oblivious of the passers-by who eddied round him and of the traffic which accelerated past his nose.

  Even when Roskill slid the Triumph alongside the kerb beside him he did not move at once. And nor, when he did move, did he bother to verify that it was Roskill. He methodically closed the magazine, turning down the page – so much Roskill could see from the driver’s seat – and simply got straight into the car, without a word.

  Roskill engaged the gears. ‘Well, we were right,’ he said.