For the Good of the State (11 page)

‘And you know him from way back?’ He was torn down the middle between what Audley was saying and what had just come into sight, down the track from the road.

‘Not from way back. I first met him fifteen years ago.’

Tom held his face rigid. The measure of Audley’s intelligence memory was that
fifteen years
wasn’t
way back
to him. And the measure of the difference between Nikolai Panin’s world and their own was what he was watching now, outside.

‘I did him a good turn … after a fashion—’ Audley was slightly thrown by his failure to turn back from the window this time. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t tear himself away from what he was seeing ‘—and he returned the compliment, a few years later … after a fashion.’

‘Yes?’ What that meant was that self-interest and cooperation had briefly coincided for David Audley and Nikolai Panin, no more. But also that those two occasions had been the beginning of some sort of relationship between them over fifteen years, nevertheless. If But he couldn’t go on watching. ‘Yes? What was his fashion, then?’

‘None of your business—’ Audley read his face. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Now he wants to meet you again, is what’s the matter, David.’

‘And now I want to see
him
.’ Audley frowned, dissatisfied with that explanation. ‘What were you looking at, Tom?’

‘The police have arrived, David,’ he admitted.

The old man relaxed slightly. ‘They have?’

‘Not “They”, David—it’s just one policeman.’ Tom turned back to the window, inclining suddenly towards cruelty. ‘He’s just taking his bicycle clips off his ankles now. And he doesn’t seem very scared, either—he’s just parking his bicycle alongside my car … and he’s looking around as though he owns the place—six-foot-plus, slim build … about forty, forty-five … fair complexion—red weather-beaten, or a winter holiday on the Costa del Sol, or regular visits to your local pub—I don’t know which at this distance.’

‘Yes.’ Audley took one step, but then stopped. ‘That’ll be Alan—Constable Grant … Does he have a carrier on the back of his cycle?’

‘Yes—’ Tom stared at the bicycle ‘—he’s got some vegetables in it—or something green—?’

‘Bedding plants, most likely,’ agreed Audley. ‘Alan knows just where to go in the village, to fill his garden in the spring. That’ll be him, right enough. So … Faith will have to give him some of her plants, from the greenhouse—’

‘
David—
for Christ’s sake!’

Audley stood where he was. ‘It’s all right. She planted far more than we need for bedding-out … And no bugger’s going to shoot a village policeman, Tom—not at 600 yards, in default of me—or you.’ He shook his head. ‘Not even Bonaparte would pay him 10,000 francs for that.’

Harvey had said that Audley wasn’t popular in certain quarters, and Tom could see why that might be true. ‘So you’re not scared any more?’

Audley swayed, and then steadied himself. ‘Oh … I’m still scared—’

A heavy front-door-knocker banging echoed in the distance, from somewhere in the depths of the house.

‘That’s Alan.’ Audley nodded. ‘There’s an electric bell, and a bell on a chain, out there. But Alan always uses the door-knocker. He doesn’t believe in gadgets.’

The echoes died away, but now there was another sound—of tyres scattering gravel, and then of a car coming up the drive from the road.

‘I’m about as scared as Nikolai Panin should be,’ said Audley. ‘Because Fred Clinton laid down a sanction—oh, about twenty years ago, after some rogue East German tried to do for him what Sous-Officier Cantillon tried to do for Wellington, without KGB clearance … And Fred wasn’t going to have
that
game played with impunity by all and sundry, with apologies afterwards.’ He gave Tom one of his brutal expressions. ‘Fred was no more a gentleman than Bonaparte was—or Nikolai Panin is, you see, Tom.’

Tom heard the police car scatter gravel again, as it reached the forecourt. But that was no longer important.

‘So he invented
MAD—
or his version of it—long before the Pentagon did … “
Mutual Assured Destruction”
, eh?’ Another nod. ‘Only his version wasn’t a general holocaust—it was much more precise … But not
exactly
precise, in case one particular KGB boss wanted us to take out one of his rivals—you understand, Tom?’

He had heard of this, although almost as a legend rather than the truth: the
life-for-a-life
consensus in the intelligence community, which constrained and inhibited them from killing each other at the higher levels.

‘You know what I’m talking about?’ Audley had heard the doors of the police car slam, but he ignored the sounds.

‘Yes.’ The revenge-names were pricked at the highest level, the word was. And Research and Development was the highest level.

This time the electric bell pealed out, from down below and up above simultaneously, halfway to the sound of the burglar alarm.

‘So if I’m taken out, then Panin can’t expect to celebrate this Christmas either. Because he’s my exact opposite.’ The bell rang again, and Audley waited for the echoes to die away. ‘So the sooner we meet now, the better for both of us.’

TO AUDLEY’S
scrambled phone Tom said: ‘
Would you hold for a moment, sir
’, as the door of the study opened; and then, to the Special Branch man, ‘
What is it?
’, holding his temper in check as he heard the sound of Audley’s voice approaching, through the open door; and then Faith Audley’s voice too, raised in protest—so she had been retrieved at last, from her bolt-hole, wherever it was—

‘Sir—’ The Special Branch man also heard the approaching voices, and paused understandably — but then jinked strangely, as though something unexpected had touched him from behind, lifting his left arm and looking down into the gap at the same time.

‘Sorry!’ Cathy Audley’s little face, eyes magnified behind their spectacles, and teeth metal-braced, appeared alongside him. ‘Hullo, Sir Thomas!’

‘What’s happening?’ said Jaggard in Tom’s ear. ‘Are you there?’

‘I know what a baronet is,’ said the child earnestly. ‘Father said to look it up. So I did—in my
Everyman’s Encyclopaedia
…
That’s what he
always
says: “
Look it up”
, he says. So I took
BAR
to
CAM
into the hole. And-’

‘
Cathy!
’ Faith Audley bulldozed the Special Branch man out of her way. ‘That’s enough!’

‘Are you there?’ repeated Jaggard.

‘But I didn’t tell him where the hole was, Mummy,’ the child protested. ‘I was just talking about
baronets—
’

‘Be quiet!’ Mrs Audley concentrated on Tom, ignoring her daughter. ‘Sir Thomas, will you please tell me what’s going on in my house?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom into the receiver.
Come back Beirut, come back Tripoli
! ‘Would you hold for a moment, sir.’ He frowned at the child as she squeezed past the Special Branch man:
Tripoli
?

Audley appeared behind his wife. ‘Faith love—for God’s sake!’ he caught Tom’s eye. ‘I’m sorry, Tom—’

‘Sir!’ The Special Branch man tried simultaneously to hold Tom’s attention while giving ground to Audley and his wife and avoiding a rather fragile table piled high with books. ‘Sir—?’

Come back Athens, come back Nicosia, come back Tel Aviv
! But at least Jaggard was quiet now, in his ear—

‘Sir Thomas—’ began Mrs Audley again.

Tom held up his free hand. ‘Just a moment, Mrs Audley—’ He nodded at the Special Branch man ‘—yes?’

The hill is clear, sir.‘ The man took a deep breath. ’There’s no one up there now—‘ He rolled his eyes sideways ’—but … ‘

‘Yes?’

This time the man swallowed. ‘It was a high-velocity bullet. It went through the window, and then a lampshade on a table, and then into the panelling on the wall, on the far side. But we’ll have to wait for forensic to recover it. They should be able to tell us a lot more.’

‘Thank you.’ Properly speaking, there was nothing else Mrs Audley needed to know—properly speaking, she had already heard more than she was entitled to hear, even. But in her own house, and since she was David Audley’s wife, it might be prudent to entitle her to more than that. ‘So what else are you doing?’

‘Tom—’ Audley’s mouth opened. ‘Who’s on the phone?’

‘It’s okay, David.’ It would never do for Audley to know that: Jaggard was on the other end; it was bad enough to know himself that Jaggard was quite remarkably laid-back with this hideous turn of events, almost as though he’d expected them; or, at least, that they didn’t surprise him, ‘Just the duty man—’ He turned back to the Special Branch man quickly. ‘—Well?’

‘There’ll be more support manpower here soon.’ The man didn’t know quite what to say. ‘It’s almost too late for road-blocks—we’re very close to the motorway here. And we’re almost into the Gatwick radius, anyway … ’ He shrugged ‘ … we can’t inhibit traffic inside that without Home Office clearance, sir.’

So much for
Limejuice
, thought Tom: if someone in Athens had taken a shot at Colonel Stamatopoulos, or one of his friends, then half of Greece would have ground to a halt. But in the Home Counties of England, and with no blood spilt, the traffic had to get through regardless.

‘David—’ Mrs Audley addressed her husband, failing Tom.

‘I told you, love—some fool has got his lines crossed, that’s all.’

‘You also told me that
Limejuice
was just a precaution, after last time—’

‘That was … that was ten years ago, love.’

‘I don’t care if it was a hundred years—’

‘Mrs Audley—Faith—’ Obligation and self-interest suddenly coincided: he needed Audley to himself and he had to get the man away from her and here as soon as possible. But now he had a chance to cement a relationship which Mamusia had begun before he had been thought of ‘—your husband’s right, actually.’ He remembered the Special Branch man. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll come back to you. But we’ll want an escort vehicle—‘

‘And a car for my wife,’ said Audley. ‘I don’t want her here tonight.’

‘Right—that too.’ Tom nodded the Special Branch man out of the room before turning back to Faith Audley. But then he also remembered Jaggard. ‘Hullo?’ There really wasn’t anything else that he wanted to say to Jaggard, the bugger seemed so remarkably laid-back in the circumstances of their high-velocity bullet. ‘I’ll call you again when I’m free.’

‘Don’t bother, Tom. I’ve got the general picture well enough. You just watch over Audley and his old friend, that’s all. Just get Audley to the rendezvous first—then I want to know what he gets up to—where he’s going, and who he’s talking to. And preferably in advance—do you understand that?’

‘Yes.’ It took no effort to slam the phone down.
Come back Beirut
…
but, most of all,
where are you now, Willy
? ‘I’m sorry, Faith—’

‘No.’ Some of the fire seemed to have gone out of her, damped down under the fine drenching spray of cruel reality. ‘I can see that I’m getting in the way of more pressing matters.’ She gave her husband a weary little smile. ‘There’s a right time for being difficult, and this isn’t it.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’ll go quietly, Sir Thomas—in fact, I’ll just go and pack my toothbrush. All right?’

‘No.’ It was working out so well that Tom was almost ashamed. ‘What I meant was that some fool
has
got his lines crossed—and I am the fool. So your husband was really just protecting me.’ He knew that he mustn’t look at Audley, for fear that she might do the same. ‘The bullet was for me, Mrs Audley, you see. Not for him.’

‘What—?’ The lie caught her in the act of turning away. But that, most annoyingly, left her half-facing her husband. ‘David—?’

‘Ahh … ’ A lifetime of dissimulation had greased the big man’s mental reflexes. ‘Well … to be fair, that’s for the experts to say, Tom.’

‘It was for me, David.’ He could only admire the crafty way Audley had fixed the lie, with so little warning. ‘But … you understand, Mrs Audley—Faith … that I can’t tell you what I usually do. But, in any case, I’m not doing it now—’
True, Tom Arkenshaw, you lying bastard
! But what could he say next ‘—so I trust it won’t happen again—’
Not good enough
! He could see that in her face ‘—but I’ll keep an eye on him now, I promise you, anyway.’
True again
! he thought.
But what a fearful promise
! But, for better or worse, it was made now. And that sort of promise couldn’t be unmade, which was worst of all.

‘Huh!’ Audley chuckled obscenely. ‘Just keep away from me—that’s all!’

‘
David!
’ She gave him a broken look. ‘You look after yourself too, Sir Thomas.’ She drew a breath. ‘I have to believe that my husband is indestructible.’ She took another breath. ‘I’ll go and find my toothbrush, anyway.’

Tom watched her depart, chin up.

‘I shall get hell in due course,’ murmured Audley. ‘But, in the meantime—’

‘No!’ All Tom wanted to do was to think in peace for a moment, before they all came back to him again: to think about what Jaggard had said, and hadn’t said; and about what Harvey had said, and had hinted at; and about Audley too; and maybe even about Mamusia. ‘You just go and pack your toothbrush too, David. We can talk in the car—okay?’

At first Audley didn’t reply. Then, when he did, he sounded as though his gratitude was already being stretched. ‘I was only going to thank you for that little white lie. But … ’ he shrugged ‘ … if that’s the way you want it, you’re the boss.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘For the time being, anyway.’

Tom waited for a moment, then turned back to the huge cluttered desk, staring for another moment at the red phone among the tower-blocks of books and magazines and buff folders, and the scatter of notes and notebooks and photo-copied newspaper cuttings, which together left no square inch of its surface free.

Jaggard had not really been surprised
, he decided—

Places in the books—and in the magazines—were liberally reminded with numerous slips of differently coloured paper, pale pink and green and blue; and there were passages marked in the newspaper cuttings too, Audley-interest-stained with broad soft-felt pen-ink of similar colours, like cross-references.