The Memory Trap Page 5

  ‘Yes.’ He was here now, in the Bay of Naples. So the bottom line was that Jack Butler was relying on him to make the right decision without any footling restriction, as from company commander to second-lieutenant. And the years which separated him from Peter Richardson, also separated Jack from that: even though he was now back in the field, and far from home, Butler expected him to weigh politics and diplomacy, as well as survival, and coming safe-home to Mrs Faith Audley and Miss Catherine Audley, into the bargain.

  ‘So, in theory, you’re not supposed to be here.’ Mitchell, with his responsibility for that survival, went one better. ‘Because, whoever put that kamikaze-Ay-rab into Berlin is supposed to be presuming that he took you out with his first shot, as per contract—eh?’ But he sneered at his own hypothesis as he offered it. ‘Is that what we’re supposed to assume?’ He rocked with the boat’s motion: coming back to England—or, actually, to Wales—from Dun Laoghaire (which was worse than this: which was frequently sideways as well as up and down … so he had his sea-legs now, from all those Anglo-Irish crossings!). ‘But you’re not relying on that, are you?’

  Audley held on to the stanchion which Mitchell had abandoned in moving out of his reach. What neither Butler nor Mitchell could imagine was that coming back to the sharp end was more interesting: that, however uncomfortable, it also reassured him that he was still alive, and not yet too geriatric for those duties to which he nowadays helped sentence others, for whom no scheduled flights were held, and who were not delivered to (or taken off) those flights as though they were such Very Important Persons that they didn’t have to worry (or, couldn’t waste time worrying?), because they were Too Important. So that now (no matter how frightened he could be if he let himself think about it) … at least he wasn’t so bored with life anyway!

  ‘Very well! So Kulik was waiting for me. But so was the Arab. And he took out Ted Sinclair, believing he was me. So why Kulik, then—? If he was just bait?’

  Mitchell shrugged. ‘So maybe they double-crossed him.’ Another shrug. ‘The mouse springs the trap—who cares about the cheese? Not the Russians!’

  ‘No.’ Elizabeth shifted uneasily. ‘It doesn’t fit.’

  Mitchell looked at her in surprise. ‘What doesn’t fit, Lizzie?’

  ‘It doesn’t fit the Russians, Dr Mitchell.’

  ‘No? Everything’s sweetness and light now, is it? Glasnost and Perestroika, and all that jazz?’ He cocked his head at her. ‘And nice Mr Gorbachev off to New York to announce missile cuts—and army cuts, too? Is that what you’ve been working on, Lizzie: doing Jack Butler’s sums for him? Don’t kid yourself, Miss Loftus—‘

  ‘I’m not kidding myself.’ Elizabeth allowed herself to be provoked at last. ‘You’ve been too long in Ireland, Paul.’

  That was probably true, thought Audley critically. (And, typically for Research and Development, they each had a shrewd idea of what the other had been doing. So much for departmental security!)

  ‘That may very well be, my dear Elizabeth.’ Mitchell rolled loosely for a moment as he took her measure. ‘And … you may have a point with nice Mr Gorbachev, even … seeing how he hasn’t really any choice, the way the wind’s blowing.’ He nodded again. ‘But not everyone in the Kremlin has got the message yet—let alone in Dzerzhinsky Street and Arbatskaya Ploshchad.’ This time he grinned. ‘Apart from which, if Comrade Kulik could still have had something to sell … And he was on the level … even nice Mr Gorbachev wouldn’t think twice about putting him down, for the good of Glasnost—eh?’

  ‘With a hired assassin?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘An incompetent assassin?’

  They were both volleying at the net now—

  ‘He wasn’t all that incompetent, Lizzie—‘

  ‘He didn’t recognize David.’ She looked at Audley: she’d had enough of this exchange. But he wasn’t yet ready to intervene.

  ‘So he had a contract for one large male Caucasian, maybe.’ Suddenly it was Mitchell who was uneasy. ‘Or maybe he panicked when it looked like Kulik was being picked up, and simply decided to settle for poor old Ted. It happens, Lizzie. If you panic.’

  ‘In Ulster maybe it happens.’ She came back to Audley again. ‘I don’t know, David. But it just doesn’t feel right.’ She frowned at him. ‘Killing you, David … ‘

  ‘Yes.’ Mitchell wasn’t quite ready to quit. ‘Now that would have been a scandal, I grant you.

  ’

  He matched her frown.

  ‘

  Our David is

  …

  just a bit too

  grand for sudden death

  —

  you

  ’

  re right there, Lizzie

  …

  ‘

  He trailed off finally, leaving

  “

  This isn’t Ireland” unsettled between them.

  ‘

  So what have we got then? A bit of rogue KGB-GRU private enterprise, David?

  ’

  They were both looking at him.

  ‘Or … a third party?’ Elizabeth accepted victory diplomatically. ‘Have the Germans identified the Arab yet? He had this suspect passport—and the Israelis were very helpful over that, Schneider said.’

  ‘They were, yes.’ Mitchell steadied himself.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘I talked to Schneider this morning, while I was waiting for you, David.’ Mitchell sounded only slightly apologetic. ‘Minding you … I wanted to know who we might be up against, just in case … just in case your Arab had friends. That was when he told me all about the gun.’

  ‘And the passport?’

  ‘It was a very good one, actually. What they call a “Bakaa Valley” job—the Israelis do.’ He watched Audley. ‘They’re experts on Arabs and passports, your old Israeli friends are. And your other old friend, Colonel Benedikt Schneider, is well-in with them. So they obliged him by identifying it for him: it’s part of a lot they’ve picked up examples of elsewhere … from Abu Nidal-PFLP distribution. Which doesn’t mean much precisely, because any of those splinter groups will provide a hitman if the deal is right, Schneider says. Complete with a one-way ticket, even.’ He paused. ‘Which fits Berlin rather uncomfortably, I’m afraid, David. Because whoever hired that Ay-rab must have known you’d have protection. So two shots were the most he’d expect to manage before the Verfassungsschutz took him out. But he knew he was going to paradise afterwards. So he didn’t care.’

  No wonder Mitchell was twitchy, thought Audley.

  Then Mitchell made a face at him. ‘Which doesn’t get us much further, if you really don’t know why you’ve suddenly become so unpopular all of a sudden. Which … I take it you don’t? Otherwise—?’ He turned away almost casually. ‘Lovely view, eh Miss Loftus—Sorrento … Capri? And our own transport, too!’

  Otherwise you wouldn’t be here hung between them for an instant, before the sea-breeze blew it away.

  ‘It’s a smuggler’s boat.’ To Audley’s surprise she let herself be diverted.

  ‘Is it, indeed?’ Mitchell looked up and down the craft. ‘Or ex-smuggler’s boat, presumably?’ He fixed finally on the low wheel-house. ‘Although your Guardia friends are certainly dressed for the part, Lizzie. Is that to help us mix with the locals, just to be unobtrusive, then—?’

  They were playing with him. But, they were both scared, he decided. So, in spite of the past and the insuperable present of their relationship, they had suddenly come to an unspoken agreement. Because fear, like politics, made for strange alliances.

  Or, anyway, what Elizabeth said next would confirm that—

  ‘Not Guardia, Paul.’ She leaned over the paint-flaked gunwale, pretending to study the still-indistinct loom of Capri through the haze. ‘Captain Cuccaro is Intelligence, not Guardia … Although I don’t know about the crew, such as it is … ‘

  ‘They look like a bunch of pirates, whatever they are.’ Failing to get any reaction from Audley,
Mitchell was forced to prolong the exchange. ‘Are we being met, in Capri?’

  ‘I expect so.’ Elizabeth wasn’t so good at playing games: she couldn’t think what to say next.

  ‘You haven’t told them where we’re going?’ Mitchell began to be stretched, in turn.

  ‘No.’ Elizabeth leaned further. And Audley found himself watching Mitchell study the stretch of her skirt across her hips, never mind whatever else was visible from their different view-points. Because, although Miss Loftus was cursed with the Loftus-face—the Loftus-jaw, particularly … her figure was all her own.

  ‘No.’ She straightened up, and looked directly at him. ‘Captain Cuccaro doesn’t yet know where we’re going. Because I wanted your instructions about that, David. But … he’s not very happy. He wants to talk to you about … ‘ She almost blundered too far ‘ … about Peter Richardson.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mitchell nodded, suddenly hard-faced. ‘And so do I, by God! Because there’s damn all in the records about him since he left us and went back to the army. And then he retired very shortly after that, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t see how he could have been a double.’ Elizabeth shook her head. ‘If he had been he’d never have left us. They’d never have let him go, once he was inside.’

  ‘So it’s more likely something from the old days.’ Mitchell watched Audley. ‘Something he knows that maybe didn’t seem important at the time … And you’re the expert on that, David.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was no good denying what Jack Butler himself had thought. ‘Whatever Richardson knows—about Kulik, or anyone else … anything else—he’s no traitor.’

  ‘What makes you so certain? He was Fred Clinton’s man, not yours, surely?’

  ‘Wrong profile.’ What he wasn’t about to do was to discuss the instincts of the late—and, in his time, great also—Frederick J. Clinton in the small matter of recruitment, let alone that of treachery: Mitchell had hardly known Fred, and never in his heyday—and Elizabeth hadn’t know him at all. And neither of them, anyway, had lived through treason’s own heyday, as Fred had done: those infamous years when everyone had been hagridden by doubts, which Fred had once dubbed “the Cambridge Age” to put his star recruit from Cambridge in his place. ‘”Profiling” went out with the ark.’ Mitchell hadn’t finished, and wasn’t going to let go. ‘It went out with Clinton.’

  ‘He was thoroughly vetted.’ He hated to hear Fred consigned to history so crudely.

  ‘But not by you, David. Fred Clinton’s man—and an old-school-tie recruit, right?’

  ‘Army, actually.’ Mitchell knew too much, again. But not quite everything.

  ‘Okay—old-regimental-tie, then.’ Mitchell was implacable. ‘Failed the old regiment—and then failed us, the way I heard it.’

  Elizabeth was frowning at him again. But he had to settle with Mitchell now. ‘Then you heard it wrong.’ The trouble was, in a perverse way the fellow had it right, all the same. He could even remember Neville Macready summing up Richardson when the news of his departure was announced: ‘Yes … well, they can’t say I didn’t warn them … Clever fellow, of course—total recall, and all that. And plenty of style with it. But … “Tiggers don’t like honey”, I said to Fred. “And they don’t like acorns. And they don’t like thistles—you’ll see”. But, of course, our Fred’s never read “Winnie-the-Pooh”—wrong generation—he simply didn’t understand what I was talking about.

  ’

  ‘How should I have heard it, then?’

  Where Mitchell had been much more importantly right, however, was that guess about “the old days”. But that was where he kept coming up against the blank wall in the records, and the equally blank wall of his memory (which was more reliable than any record). So it couldn’t—it damn-well couldn’t—be anything that they’d share, he and Richardson, that had made Kulik bracket their names in his last breath.

  ‘He was a very talented man.’ He eyed Mitchell reflectively. ‘In some respects he was maybe even better than you, Mitchell.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ Having goaded Audley into starting to answer, Mitchell wasn’t offended by the comparison. ‘But I got his job nevertheless, didn’t I?’ He even grinned knowingly at Elizabeth. ‘We’re both Audley-recruits, aren’t we, Lizzie? So … we may not be as talented. But we’re not quitters, are we?’

  Elizabeth, who hated being knowingly-grinned-at by anyone, but particularly by Dr Paul Mitchell, became even more Loftus-faced. ‘Why did he resign, David? From Research and Development? And then the army, too? If he was so good—?’

  That had been the question which had hurt Fred Clinton, when his potential star-pupil had graduated cum laude, and then turned his back on the services. But, if he—hadn’t read A. A. Milne, he had known his Dryden—

  ‘I can’t say that I’m not disappointed, David. Not to say surprised, too … Although Neville says he warned me, with some rubbish about acorns and thistles.’

  ‘Yes … but, then, it’s the difference between “cold” war and “hot” war, Fred—isn’t it?

  ’

  (That had been the first time he

  ’

  d had to face what he already knew, but hadn

  ’

  t faced: that Fred was getting old now, and that the generation-gap between those who had felt the heat, and never wanted to feel it again, and those who hadn

  ’

  t, but who wondered endlessly about what it had been like, was becoming a problem to him.)

  ‘

  It’s like it was with my late unlamented father-in-law, Fred: so long as the guns were firing, he was a hero. But once they stopped, he began to get bored. And then he got up to all sorts of mischief—

  “A daring pilot in extremity … “

  “ … but for calm unfit … “

  —so it’s probably just as well. Because he’d have got up to all sorts of mischief, if he’d stayed with us.’

  ‘Haven’t we got enough mischief for him?’

  ‘More than enough—1 agree!’ (But that had been exactly the right moment to hit Fred with what he’d been worried about himself, at that time so long ago: that memory was still sharp, by God!) ‘But he’s the sort of chap who might get involved with politics, Fred. And … de-stabilizing the Government isn’t what we’re into—is it?’

  ‘He isn’t into that.’

  ‘No.’ (Fred wasn’t over the hill yet. But he was no longer sitting on the top of it quite, either.) ‘But some of the people he knows are … or, let’s say, I’m not sure about them, anyway. And … I have rather got the impression that intelligence research bores him—when we have to advise others when to risk their necks out there—?’

  That was it: whatever Mitchell might question as unlikely, he wouldn’t argue with that. Because Mitchell and Richardson were brothers-under-the skin; only Richardson had been flawed, and Mitchell wasn’t. ‘He wasn’t a research man, at heart.’ And, also, there was that other difference—which would wound Mitchell deeply. But it would also stop his mouth, too. ‘He was a soldier, you might say. And we didn’t have a proper war for him. So that’s why he resigned—from the army, as well as from R and D, Paul.’

  ‘Yes. He resigned.’ Unexpectedly, Elizabeth hit him from the flank. ‘But he also retired, David—from everything? Just like that—from everything?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ Once the man had left R and D, that had been the end of him, was all he could recall. Fred had helped him back, of course: it had been Fred’s influence which had promoted him from captain to major … if not to keep him on his career-track, then maybe not to discourage their next recruit. So that had been merely prudent, never mind keeping faith with Richardson himself.

  He shrugged. ‘Well … that was afterwards.’ All he could recall from afterwards was the office gossip in which he hadn’t been interested. Peter Richardson—Major Richardson now—back with his regiment had been of no consequence whatsoever: he had smashed up one of his sports cars (and been smashed up in it, with it … but
that was no great surprise!); and then his adored Italian mother had died, on whom he had doted. (And that had been sad, maybe … but that was the way the world was: kings and queens and chimney-sweepers all had to die sometime; and so did mothers: mothers, and kings and queens and chimney-sweepers were dying all the time. And, anyway, the Principessa had died loaded with lire, to pay for a great big Italian hearse, drawn by four black horses through Amalfi, to solace her loving son in his grief in his inherited palazzo.)

  ‘That was when he retired—resigned?’ It was Elizabeth again, not Mitchell. But, where Mitchell had merely questioned him about the sequence of events, Elizabeth was frowning at the events themselves.

  So now he wasn’t so sure of himself. But what he remembered wasn’t in doubt, nevertheless. ‘That was when he sent in his papers—yes. Because then he had all his inheritance to manage. All the family estates, up and down the coast, Elizabeth—‘ What made that doubly-sure was that one of Fred Clinton’s criteria had been money, always: a man’s politics and his sexual weaknesses were two things which mattered most, in those old days. But if he already had money, at least that ruled out arguments about his expenses allowance, when the budget was tight ‘—so … that was old money, anyway.’ And that was what Fred had liked best: old money. Apart from which, Peter Richardson had always loved his other country, as well as his mother: he had been almost as patriotic about the ancient Republic of Amalfi, which was more than half-a-thousand years older than Italy itself, than about his other Land-of-Hope-and-Glory.

  But Elizabeth was still frowning at him. ‘What’s the matter, Elizabeth?’

  She was still frowning. And so much so that even Paul Mitchell wanted to know what the matter was, also—