Other Paths to Glory (6 page)

He smiled from Bell to Mitchell.

‘The office of chief constable is one of the great bulwarks of our democracy, because he isn’t subject to politics. In fact it really isn’t subject to anything, democracy included, and that does make it marvellously vulnerable to the old boys’ network - a word and a nod from the right quarter, you understand. Believe me, I’ve seen it work.’

Flummery again: he was talking to them, but at her, using safe words of authority to reassure her -
OBE, chief constable, Royal Garden Party and Home Secretary.

Only with Mother even that wasn’t quite good enough.

‘But Dr Audley - I mean, can’t they protect him?’

‘From whom, Mrs Mitchell? We don’t know. And from what? We don’t know that either.’

The flippancy had gone from Audley’s voice, to be replaced by a sudden seriousness which was all the more chilling by contrast.

‘We don’t even know why.’

They were back to the same blank wall behind which Audley had hidden earlier, and this time Mitchell himself almost accepted its solidity. But then the cracks in it gaped at him: twice in one day this man had come looking for him, and certainly not because he had developed a sudden interest in the battle of the Somme. And (what was nearer the bone) he had accepted the truth of the towpath story without question, almost as though he had been expecting it.

‘I can’t believe this is really happening to us - it’s like a nightmare.’ Mother shook her head despairingly. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

‘Think how your son came home to you, Mrs Mitchell,’ said Audley brutally. ‘And think how next time he may not come home at all.’

She stared at him as though she only half understood what he had said.

‘But there must be some mistake - ‘

‘There was a mistake right enough. The men who tried to kill him made it when they botched the job this time. Next time he won’t be so lucky, you can depend on that - next time there’ll be no mistake.’

She was getting the shock treatment now - Audley had cast her as a distraught mother and he was making sure she understood her part properly -
This time?

The double meaning hit Mitchell like a blow in the stomach.

This time, next time -
last time
!

He hadn’t been the first victim, but the second - that was why Audley hadn’t been surprised, by God!

Charles Emerson had come before him.

MITCHELL LAY ON
his back, watching the pale grey light of dawn advance and recede as an intermittent breath of wind stirred the bedroom curtains.

He had long passed the waking moment of confusion, when for a few seconds he had not known where he was, but only that he lay in a strange soft bed in a strange quiet room. The moment had been instantly followed by a feeling that he must still be asleep, lapped in a vivid and intricate dream, and that by shutting his eyes again he could drift away on the dark tide again until his mind was ready to open itself to reality.

But the warmth and snugness of the bed was too real and the lavendery smell of the strange room was too strong - no dream had ever smelt of lavender before, no dream had smelt of anything at all. And the fragrance of it, the genteel odour of middle-class England, was still all around him.

He had the distinct impression that he had been intellectually seduced - primed with words and liquor and soft lights, and taken for all he was worth … and before that he had been physically battered too -

‘Tell me about the Somme, Paul - may I call you Paul?’

Physically battered. He reached gingerly inside his pyjama jacket again to examine the strapping on his left shoulder. The ache had gone, but there was still a mildly painful stiffness to remind him of noise and rushing water and numbing coldness. He didn’t want to think of that…

‘Tell me about the Somme, Paul - ‘

They had driven out of the town on the western road, and then turned a little to the south, after which he had seen no familiar landmarks in the darkness through the rain-blurred windows. He had still had most of his wits about him then, but he’d been concentrating on matters other than geography.

‘First you tell me about Professor Emerson, Dr Audley.’

‘You think there’s something to tell?’

Audley leant forward to concentrate on the road ahead.

‘There’s a turning just here I don’t want to miss - ah, there’s the sign.’

‘Isn’t there?’ Mitchell paused to let him complete the manoeuvre. ‘You didn’t come back tonight just to ask me about the Somme. You came back because something happened after you left me.’

‘Y-ess,’ Audley nodded at the windscreen. ‘You’re quite right, of course. Something happened. I rather fancy you’ve already guessed what it was - your old tutor warned me you never needed two and two to make four.’

‘He didn’t die in the fire, did he, Dr Audley?’

‘It’ll be easier if you call me David … No, he didn’t.’

Mitchell stared at the outline of the hedgerow picked out in the headlights. He didn’t know whether it made Emerson’s death more or less bearable that it should have been murder, not accident. What had changed was the focus of his own anger.

‘So the fire was just to cover up?’

‘Not just to cover up, to destroy also. He was struck from behind, and then arranged at the bottom of the stairs. But the fire was started in his study, among his papers.’

Mitchell drew a sharp breath. Somehow that made it worse, far worse: to destroy not only a man, but also his work. The maps and the files and the carefully documented papers he knew so well … and above all the manuscript, the great work of love and scholarship. That was the ultimate, unforgiveable vandalism, like the destruction of something on the point of life.

‘They’d thought it out quite neatly,’ continued Audley, ‘the scenario … Emerson upstairs, smelling the fire maybe, then losing his footing and knocking himself out. It just might have worked.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘No,’ Audley grunted. ‘And when you’re trying to cover up a murder a miss is as good as a mile.’

‘Why didn’t it work?’

‘Ah - well, basically for two reasons, one of which you will certainly understand.’

Audley took his eyes off the road for an instant to nod conspiratorially at Mitchell. ‘It isn’t difficult to kill people if you’ve a mind to, as the Irish are so fond of proving to us. And with Professor Emerson and yourself notched up in one day, these people have certainly demonstrated their enthusiasm for it.’

‘You’re pretty sure it was the same pair?’

‘Not necessarily the same pair, I don’t know about that yet. But the same guiding intelligence, I’m sure of that. Because whoever composed your little suicide note must have already known your professor wasn’t going to contradict it.’

Audley paused.

‘But that isn’t a reason why their plan didn’t work out, of course … No, the general reason is that while it’s easy to murder it’s bloody difficult
to fake
a murder - there are too many things to go wrong once you complicate a basically simple act.’

‘You mean luck?’

Audley shook his head.

‘I prefer not to think of luck coming into it. It’s just that you limit your control of the sequence of action … Take your own case, for example - ‘

Your own case.
The sound of the dry, academic voice faded for a moment as Mitchell felt his chest tighten. He still couldn’t hold reality steady for more than a few minutes at a time, and every time he succeeded he liked it less.

‘ - could have cracked you on the head first. And you know why they didn’t?’

It was Paul Mitchell they were discussing, the Paul Mitchell he knew and loved so well, who lived in a very ordinary, rather boring world and worried about girls and money and making a modest name for himself.

‘Because you were going to be a suicide, so you had to drown,’ continued Audley conversationally. ‘They were probably afraid to mark you, because marks make policemen suspicious. Or maybe they were afraid of hitting you too hard, because every schoolboy knows that dead men won’t drown. So they left it to the weir, and the weir didn’t do its job properly. It was out of their control, quite simply.

‘Now, Professor Emerson’s case illustrates the same thing, but in a different way.

They killed him with a blow on the neck - which the fall downstairs was supposed to account for. But the fire was also intended to obliterate everything, and the fire let them down just like the weir.’

‘You mean, it didn’t burn? The papers weren’t destroyed?’

Audley sighed.

‘No, I’m afraid they did manage that. By the time the fire brigade got there the study was like a furnace.’

‘Then how did the fire let them down?’

‘Ah, well that’s the other reason why faked murders don’t work: people do tend to underestimate the efficiency and the intelligence of the experts they hire to look after them. Like the firemen, for a start - just because they wear uniforms and ring bells it doesn’t mean they’re idiots.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You will, believe me … You see, someone spotted the blaze - someone on the top deck of a double-decker bus that was passing. And so the fire didn’t have time to reach the body. Then as soon as the police and the firemen put their heads together they didn’t like the look of things. The firemen reckoned the fire in the study had started in more than one place, and the police couldn’t understand how Emerson had given himself a karate chop on the banisters. That’s simplifying what they told me, but it all added up to the same thing: the fire let the murderers down - it wasn’t as efficient as the fire brigade.’

Mitchell digested the information in silence. It was evident that Audley had barged straight in, waving his little black book with the same magic effect as it had had on poor Constable Bell, who must be even now lying unhappily like a trooper to his sergeant. Whatever agency the big man served, it opened and closed official doors with disturbing ease - and either accidentally or by design he had just warned Mitchell not to underestimate ‘the experts’, of whom he was obviously one. And a rather senior one at that.

Yet there was something distinctly odd about the time sequence of it all … They had come to him and he had sent them to Emerson, an action which he had regretted at the time, but which had turned out to be a fortunate one for him. Yet Emerson had already been dead by then and his own death had been decided on…

‘You said you got my name from the War Museum?’

Coincidence, that was what was odd. He had felt somehow that Audley was sparking events, but that couldn’t be the way of it any more. They’d been converging on him independently from both sides. Audley and - the unknown ones.

‘I did.’

Again that sidelong glance.

‘If I read you right I rather think it’s time to admit that we weren’t quite - ah - straightforward with you this afternoon, Colonel Butler and I.’

‘I never doubted it,’ Mitchell tried to sound more knowing than he felt. ‘But I found your obsession with the Somme - well, confusing, to say the least.’

It seemed to be Audley’s turn for silence now; he drove slowly, though not very expertly, for about a mile before speaking again, as though the effort of becoming more straightforward was a considerable one.

‘Y-ess … well, you see, Paul - it wasn’t your name we started off with. It was Emerson’s.’

‘Emerson’s?’

Mitchell was suddenly at a loss for words.

‘That’s right,’ Audley said gently, as though he was aware that he might be injuring his listener’s self-esteem. ‘And the War Museum gave us his telephone number, but we couldn’t get through to him - his phone was dead.’

The phone had been in the study, Mitchell remembered.

‘So we called the Museum back, and they told us about you. They said you’d be in the Institute, and if anyone knew where Emerson was to be found, you would … They also said you were the best young researcher in the business, if that’s any consolation.’

It wasn’t really so ego-bruising. He had been a little surprised as well as flattered by their arrival at the Institute, but to be overshadowed by Charles Emerson was no disgrace.

‘Why didn’t you ask me straight out where he’d most likely be?’

Audley gave a small shrug.

‘We prefer not to advertise our intentions unless we have to. I suppose you could say we make a habit of using the indirect approach.’

Again Mitchell subsided to digest his latest shreds of information. The fragment of Somme map was the only tangible clue he’d seen, and he knew now at least that Audley’s interest in the battle was no smokescreen, but the starting point of whatever he was doing. He knew also that Audley and the killers had been concerned with Emerson, not with him. He was reduced to a bit player, almost an innocent bystander.

But a victim nevertheless.

‘Why the hell do they want to kill me?’ he exploded angrily, outrage supplanting fear as he stared down again into the river.

There came a dry grunt, almost a chuckle, from beside him.

‘For the oldest and best reason in the world, my lad - you know too much!’

‘But, Christ -‘

‘And you know the wrong man, too. At the wrong time, as well - because you were there this morning, weren’t you?’

This morning. God! It was unbelievable that it had only been this morning.

‘Talking to him in that conservatory of his next to the study for all to see - for them to see,’ went on Audley. ‘Looking over papers, poring over maps - did you do that?’

‘Yes, but-‘

‘You were setting yourself up, Paul. That is, if you weren’t already set up.’

‘But
why
?’

‘Well, let’s look at it from their viewpoint. Emerson knows something they don’t want anyone to know. So he must die. But then there’s his former research assistant, Master Paul Mitchell, who did half his leg-work in France last year and still comes to see him twice a week. It’s a damn good bet that what Emerson knows, Paul Mitchell knows. So Paul Mitchell must die too - simple.’

All the outrage was gone as Mitchell felt himself cringing inwardly with panic.

‘I don’t know anything worth being killed for.’