For the Good of the State Page 5

  But this was foolishness—mere schoolboy foolishness—thinking about … not Audley, not Panin … but what Willy might be doing; tonight—

  But she had said ‘Goodbye, my love—take good care!’

  The road curved more sharply than he had expected, and there was a great high downland ridge swinging away from him as he twisted the wheel, then swinging back into view, stark against the confused sky, which didn’t know whether it was winter or spring.

  How much emphasis had she put on that? Had it been no more than a casual goodbye—a warning not to drive too fast? And why should that matter to her, anyway? Or to him?

  Even the bloody sun had come out now, suddenly hot through the windscreen, making him blink—when it had finally pissed down out of dark clouds over Ranulf’s bloody little ditches, and she had stood there watching him leave her in the lurch, and—

  Oh shit! thought Tom. He had forgotten to pay the bloody hotel bill!

  And there was another sign-post: Upper Horley that way, and Steeple Horley—

  He had left her in the lurch, and soaking wet, and with the bill. And there was that naval attaché, clean-cut and crew cut, and a good Anglo-Saxon Protestant out of Annapolis and Polaris—or Trident— whose father was a distinguished professor of something at Harvard, or Yale—

  Of Scythian Archaeology, maybe—?

  Tom gritted his teeth and jammed his foot on the brake simultaneously as he realized he was over-shooting the sign he’d been looking for, which was half-hidden in an overgrown tangle of hedge.

  The car bucked and skidded slightly under him, on the loose gravel of a road which was only half-a-car’s width wider than a track. But mercifully there was nothing behind him to slam into his backside, only a distant cyclist he’d overtaken half-a-mile earlier. But … it had said The Old House, hadn’t it—?

  It was very quiet, as much in the middle of a sudden sun-lit nowhere as he had been so happily this morning with Willy, under those rain-clouds. “Rain at first, followed by bright periods spreading from the West”, the weather man had said on the radio this morning. But the truth was that ‘bright periods’ were all in the mind, not the sky.

  He engaged reverse gear savagely, scattering the gravel again for an instant before remembering the lone cylist and jamming on the brakes again in panic, gripping the wheel convulsively as he squinted into the mirror.

  But there was no cyclist in view now—

  Tom frowned into the mirror, first relieved, then angry with himself for his carelessness, and then mystified, in quick succession. Where had the cyclist gone—?

  He lowered the driver’s window and poked his head out of the car. The high curve of the downland was still there, sharp against an outrageously blue sky—the last rearguard of this morning’s clouds were far to the east now. But … if this was Steeple Horley, there was bugger-all to it—not a roof in sight, let alone a steeple.

  Then he saw the cyclist, watching from a gap in the hedgerow on the other side of the road, fifteen yards back, peering from behind a blackthorn tangle and a large pair of spectacles.

  ‘Is this—’ As Tom took a second breath to pitch his voice louder he couldn’t honestly blame the cyclist for taking cover from such a lunatic driver ‘—is this Steeple Horley?’ Manners! ‘Could you tell me, please?’

  The head vanished instantly, but the rear wheel of the bicycle came into view just below where it had been, as though the cyclist—it had been a boy in an American baseball cap—was readying himself for instant flight.

  ‘Steeple Horley, is this?’ Tom addressed the rear wheel.

  The head appeared again, hesitantly and partially, and then nodded. ‘Yes.’

  About ten years old, estimated Tom. And, as small boys must not talk to strange men, needing encouragement. ‘Where’s the steeple?’

  The boy drew breath. ‘Sixteen-thirty—it fell down then.’

  And ‘sixteen-thirty’ would be in the reign of King Charles the First, not at 4.30 yesterday afternoon: the spectacles somehow suggested precocious erudition to Tom, and encouraged him towards precision. ‘I’m looking for “The Old House”—where Dr David Audley lives—?’

  The boy stared at him for a moment. ‘Why?’

  That wasn’t at all what Tom had expected. But a straight question required a straight answer. ‘I have an appointment with him. He’s expecting me.’

  ‘Oh!’ The boy rose up on one tip-toe to apply his other foot to its pedal. ‘In that case … follow me!’ Then he vanished again.

  Tom backed the car obediently, until he reached the hedgerow gap again, and saw that he had been right the first time: the overgrown legend or the sign did indeed indicate that The Old House lay somewhere down the equally overgrown lane down which the boy had invited him. But of the boy himself, and the bicycle, there was no sign.

  Twenty yards down the lane there was a gap in the great tangle of thorn and blackberry bushes on his left, revealing a tiny brick cottage surrounded by apple-trees and an immaculately-tilled vegetable garden. But there was no boy and no bicycle waiting for him at its picket-gate. And there wasn’t any garage, or even a break in the brief ramshackle fence, and the lane continued beyond the gap; so did Audley have a son, then—and a wife—in this Old House of his? Harvey hadn’t said—Harvey must simply have taken it for granted that he knew, or that it was of no importance; or maybe Harvey had left him to stew in his own juice, on being dismissed; but he hadn’t thought to ask, anyway.

  He accelerated cautiously. If the boy was Audley’s … allowing that he might be a spindly-twelve, home from some expensive local prep school … that would predi-cate a much younger wife, or an elderly mother—?

  He was in the midst of an annoyingly ill-founded and inadequately-based hypothesis when the hedge fell away abruptly, and he saw what was undoubtedly The Old House, on his right—old stone and buttressed—an ancient roof, with an early-sixteenth-century pitch: as a house it hardly made sense in its lack of coherent architectural purpose, with what looked like a barn abutting it—a buttressed barn also, without windows, but with a fine arched doorway wide enough for a loaded wagon, and built of fine ashlar much too good for any barn in a countryside where worked-stone would have been at a premium, with no quarries handy, or rivers up which such stone could easily be brought.

  He had to swing the wheel hard again as the lane ended while he was making nonsense of what he saw, to bring the car round into a wide square of gravel, in the L-shape of the eccentric house and the impossible barn: stone like that was like gold-dust—or gold-blocks—like the high-cost outer skin of castles designed to resist rams at close quarters, or petraries and mangonels and trebuchets at a distance, in siege warfare; or to impress the neighbours when English life became more settled and civilized … but not for a bloody barn—not stone as beautiful as that, for God’s sake!

  But there was a ditch, right in the middle of an expanse of rough-cut fieldgrass—

  Tom got out of the car, frowning. It didn’t look like a serious defensive ditch, for there was no sign of berm or rampart. But maybe there’d been a palisade—it could have been a pathetically-defended manor house, or even an Anglo-Saxon site … compared with Norman works, domestic Anglo-Saxon work was a joke, mostly. And it was undoubtedly a very old ditch—

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The question caught Tom between the shoulder-blades, at his greatest disadvantage, back in another time.

  ‘Yes—’ He swivelled in the gravel ‘—I’m sorry—’

  ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tall, thin, blonde—slightly faded blonde—fortyish, and well short of pretty, but not uninteresting, Tom registered in quick succession: typical well-bred English stock, perhaps a shade over-bred.

  ‘Yes.’ She agreed with him coolly. ‘My husband’s office phoned.’

  ‘Yes?’ There was something not quite right about that vague, haughty stare of hers. Tom was used to people staling at him unbelievingly—as the young policeman had done a
t first this morning, before the penny dropped; never mind his unEnglish face, few people knew what a baronetcy was, and expected an elderly knight, dubbed for long years of distinguished civil service or exuding commercial power and prestige. But although this woman wasn’t the type to make that mistake—and wasn’t quite staring unbelievingly, anyway—there was still something wrong. ‘Yes—’ He smiled hesitantly. ‘—I’m not late, am I?’

  ‘No.’ She ignored the smile. ‘But you do have some form of … ’ she extended a long thin-fingered hand on the end of a matchstick arm ‘ … of identification—?’

  ‘Oh—yes!’ The extraordinary thing was that she was somehow rather sexy with it—matchstick arms, vague expression and ash-blonde hair so pale that no one would know when she went off-white, thought Tom professionally; only the recent memory of Willy, as bouncy as a squash ball and as wholesome as her own proverbial blueberry pie, relegated the woman to the second division.

  ‘Thank you.’ She fumbled his identification, like the Tsarina accepting something rather nasty from a flea-ridden moujik, which she had to take but would have preferred not to look at before she passed it to someone else. ‘Why were you sorry?’

  ‘Why was I—?’ Now he was behaving like a moujik, damn it! ‘I was captivated by your beautiful house, actually—craning my neck like a tourist, when I should have been knocking on your door, Mrs Audley.’

  ‘I see.’ She waved his identification card briefly and very closely in front of her face, but then smiled at him, displaying fetching dimples. ‘It is rather beautiful, isn’t it? We’re terribly lucky to live in it, David and I.’

  ‘But I didn’t understand it.’ Tom knew when he was on a winner. With some women it would be their children—or their diamonds, or their dogs, or the expertise of their dress-maker. But with this one it was her home.

  Nikolai Andrievich Panin, KGB and all the way back to the NKVD of the 1940s, he thought: that was as far back as he wanted to go. But, for this moment, Panin would have to wait!

  ‘The house—?’ She tried to take another look at his picture, but it didn’t seem to do her any good. ‘Or the barn?’ She abandoned his identification in favour of the barn. ‘David loves the barn—he says there’s nothing like it in the whole of Southern England.’ She favoured him with another loving smile. ‘You know about architecture, do you, Sir Thomas? But, of course, you must do, mustn’t you—in order not to understand it, I mean?’

  He had to say something intelligent now, for God’s sake! ‘All that fine ashlar … better than the house itself!’ That was a fact, anyway: the porch in which Mrs Audley was standing had been added at a later date, but there was nothing unusual about that. But such stonework as he could see behind the wisteria which covered the house was far rougher than that of the barn. ‘But it’s that archway to the barn I really can’t understand, Mrs Audley.’

  As he gestured towards the barn doors, one of them quivered, and then began to swing outwards towards them.

  ‘The archway—of course!’ Mrs Audley gave him another tick, quite oblivious of the opening doors. “That’s what all the experts notice first—the man from Country Life was very taken with it, last year—particularly with the defaced stones on each side, where the coats-of-arms have been cut away. He thought that might have been done not long after the battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485.‘ She blinked at him, with sudden embarrassment, as though aware just too late that she had insulted him by unnecessarily adding the date to the battle. ’Henry Tudor gave the Honour of Horley to the Wilmots, after the Stokeseys had been killed at Bosworth. And the Wilmots had always hated the Stokeseys—at least, since Barnet and Tewkesbury.‘ This time she didn’t supply the date, but offered him the names of another two battles from the Wars of the Roses with another blink, as though they were two recent parliamentary by-elections.

  ‘Is that so?’ Tom was torn between the barn doors, which were now just outside his range of vision, and the dates of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in a civil war which had never particularly interested him, because it had not been distinguished by any good sieges. But it wouldn’t do to disappoint her—

  Damn! he couldn’t resist those barn doors any more (which had to be not later than mid-fifteenth century now, and were even more inexplicable)—

  The same small boy was poking his head out of the gap between the heavy doors, only now he could see that little face more clearly: enormous horn-rimmed spectacles, metal-braced teeth, and head encased in its baseball cap, which bore the legend ‘Forget—Hell’, superimposed on the red-white-and-blue starred flag of the Confederate States of America; and, as he observed the tiny apparition, it succeeded in squeezing itself through the gap only to trip on its own feet, to sprawl in the gravel.

  Barnet … and bloody Tewkesbury — ?

  ‘What is it, darling?’ Mrs Audley addressed her son, at her feet, as he searched blindly for his spectacles, which had jumped off his little nose, to fall just short of Tom’s feet.

  ‘Here—’ Tom bent to retrieve the spectacles, but failed to complete his sentence as he observed the long blonde plait which had fallen out of the baseball cap. Instead, he thought Christ! I’m slipping! I can’t tell the little girls from the little boys now!

  ‘Thank you.’ Little Miss Audley pushed her spectacles back on to her face quickly, and gave Tom half-a-second’s half-blind acknowledgement before offering her mother another pair of spectacles, which she had been carrying in her hand. ‘Your glasses, Mummy.’

  ‘What, darling?’ Mrs Audley gazed vaguely at her daughter for another half-second, and then accepted what was being offered to her. ‘Oh—thank you, Cathy dear!’

  Miss Audley turned back to Tom. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Tom searched for something to say. She might be anything from eleven to fourteen, but now that they were both wearing spectacles each was a dead ringer for the other, straight up-and-down and flat as a board, and blonde, yet wholly feminine with it: how could he have failed to see! ‘Miss Audley—?’

  ‘My daughter, Sir Thomas,’ answered Mrs Audley. ‘Cathy.’ She nodded at the child. ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, Cathy.’

  Cathy Audley gave Tom a fearsomely precocious doubting frown, as baffled as any of her elders and betters, as she offered him her hand.

  Smart girl, thought Tom. ‘Miss Audley.’ But to hell with her. ‘Your husband is expecting me, Mrs Audley, I believe?’

  After having re-examined his identification through her thick-lensed spectacles, Mrs Audley looked at him properly at last. ‘Yes, Sir Thomas … Cathy, go and tell your father that Sir Thomas has arrived.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’ Cathy focused properly on him again also, but again registered doubt. ‘Sir Thomas … Ark-Arken-?’ She began to retreat backwards towards the gap in the barn doors. ‘Arken-what?’

  ‘Shaw,’ completed Tom. ‘Like in “certain”.’

  She grinned at him as she slid into the gap. ‘Or “George Bernard”? Or “Tripoli”?’

  Tom frowned. Tripoli—! But by then she had vanished again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir Thomas,’ said Mrs Audley, shaking her head. ‘Sometimes she’s grown up. But sometimes she says things no one but her father understands—I’m sorry!’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Tripoli? wondered Tom. ‘She’s delightful, Mrs Audley—like your house.’ Tripoli? he thought again. Exactly like the house! ‘But what did she mean by “Tripoli”?’

  She shook her head again. ‘Heaven only knows! I certainly don’t!’ She laughed, half-regretfully, half-proudly. ‘But please—it’s “Faith”, not “Mrs Audley”, Sir Thomas.’ She gestured towards the porch. ‘Do come inside—David will be with us directly.’

  ‘Then it’s “Tom”.’ The thought of Audley—not David, and a world away from Father—dragged Tom back to harsh reality. And not Tripoli either—Tripoli was a damnably nasty Libyan memory: he had been scared stiff that one time he’d been in Tripoli, sailing under false colours on a dangerous coast—once in Tripoli was enough, and he w
as glad that he could never go back there. ‘Please lead the way … Faith.’

  He followed her into what seemed for a moment like cool darkness, smelling of furniture polish and the old-house-damp which so often rose from deep cellars beneath. Then he was at the foot of an oak staircase, looking up towards a window ablaze with stained-glass sunlight.

  And Panin, he thought—Nikolai Andrievich Panin—who was another world away from David Audley here and these two females-of-the-species, but also in the same world that he and Audley both inhabited outside it.

  ‘Tom—’ Faith Audley accepted the diminutive as of right, having been quite properly unimpressed with ‘Sir Thomas’ even before she’d had a clear view of him ’—we have to go through the kitchen because we’ve lost the key to the French windows in the dining room. David says he hung it up, for the winter … but heaven only knows what he actually did with it … It’ll turn up one day, of course … He’s down in the orchard making one of his bonfires—making a bonfire is one of the two jobs he’s good at … the other is making compost heaps—‘ She threw her domestic prattle over her shoulder as she led him down a short passage towards a stone-arched doorway ’—bonfires and compost heaps are major scientific operations, according to him, and I’m not allowed to touch either of them—‘ Beyond the door lay a huge kitchen, dominated by an equally huge table, scrubbed pale with time and elbow-grease ’—which is ludicrous really, because I’m the scientist in the family, and David doesn’t really know why one wire must go on one terminal—‘

  She was already opening another door while Tom was still taking in the kitchen’s weird mixture of ancient-and-modern, between its smoke-darkened beams and stone-flagged floor, and the gleaming plastic gadgetry of electric cooker and microwave and dish-washer, via a middle-aged solid fuel Aga stove, with a museum-array of copper saucepans and a blackened fireplace furnished with an iron turning-spit which could have roasted a whole pig to celebrate the news of any battle of the Wars of the Roses, if this household had been on its winning side.