Our Man in Camelot (17 page)

And, either way, blow his cover—

And screw the mission.

The man said:
When in doubt, do it by the book
.

The book said:
When the success of a mission conflicts with the survival of an operative, no operative shall abort a mission without first having evaluated comparatively its importance against the value of the said operative
—

Just great, that was. Evaluate comparatively the value of Harry Finsterwald against the importance of Mons Badonicus—how the shit did he do that?

Maybe he should do like King Arthur—take up the banner and charge—

Then Sir Mosby bore on his shoulder the banner of the Mothers
’
Union in St Swithun
’
s Churchyard, and through the strength of St Swithun and the Mothers
’
Union there was great slaughter of the heathens and they were put to flight
—

Well—hell—they might die of surprise, at that. But they sure wouldn’t mistake him for the local vicar, so—

But why not?

Why not?

By the time he reached the vestry, every trapdoor left gaping behind him, every door swinging, he was almost as breathless as he’d been after the climb up to the tower. The soft life on the base keeping the world safe for democracy had taken its toll.

But the vicar’s spare dog-collar was no bad fit, he decided gratefully as he fumbled for its button at the back—if it had been too tight God only knew what he could have done, for there was no time left for more ingenuity.

The grey linen jacket wasn’t too bad either; a shade too long in the sleeve and a couple of inches too wide at the middle, but when buttoned up not too loose to hold down the black square of material which hung from the collar. Not a shred of his unecclesiastical—and unBritish—T-shirt was now visible, and that was what mattered.

There was nothing he could do about his blue flared trousers, so that risk had to be taken. At least he was all-vicar—all authentic vicar from the hip-line up.

A hat of some sort would have been a bonus, but one glance round the vestry revealed no hat. He could only hope that they didn’t know him by sight already.

Then, as he reached for the banner, he felt a hard object move in the side-pocket of the jacket. A spectacle case, complete with spectacles. The bonus after all.

He perched them on his nose and the vestry blurred hopelessly : the vicar had long arms, but short sight—the only way he could bring things back into focus was by lowering his chin and peering over the frames. But maybe that was no bad thing after all; it might add a vague, even scholarly, look appropriate to his stolen trappings.

But there was no more time. Even now he might be too late.

He seized the furled banner and ran.

At the door at the porch he forced himself to pause. This was the last moment for second thoughts. If they knew him by sight it might be last thoughts once he was outside. But he mustn’t think of that. Instead he must rely at the worst on a few seconds of doubt. For who, after all, was the most natural person in the world to encounter in a churchyard on a fine summer’s morning?

The vicar.

He grasped the banner firmly with one hand, drew a final deep breath, and threw open the door.

Light, colour, noise and warmth enveloped him simultaneously, making him blink. The interior of the church had been cool and shadowy, filled with centuries of peace and quiet; in the bright sunshine outside everything was a dazzling green and the sounds of the birds and insects seemed deafening.

Then all these impressions vanished as his senses concentrated on the three figures under the trees near the churchyard gate.

With a fierce effort of will-power he allowed himself only the briefest glimpse of them before turning back to fasten the door behind him. He couldn’t stop his calf muscles tightening at the knowledge that his fear had become a certainty, but he could force his body to move with the calm deliberation of innocence. He was just a clergyman closing the door to his church.

Two of them.

And they’d taken Harry alive and kicking, without noise or fuss, which marked them as professionals for sure. Their mission had gone sour on them but they were making the best of a bad job: they had Harry and they could still hope for his contact.

Unwillingly, he turned away from the door and started slowly along the gravel pathway towards the gate. Only now he didn’t have to try to slow his pace, that was the way his legs wanted it. From ground level things looked a lot more hairy than they had from up above.

Two professionals, one tall and lean and the other medium and thickset, he had gotten no more than that from the glance except to note that they’d backed Harry up against one of the trees. His appearance would have disconcerted them, but they certainly wouldn’t be in a hurry to complicate matters with violence if it could be avoided, particularly to a priest in the shadow of his own church. The British police wouldn’t like that at all—and the British newspapers would like it a whole lot.

There was a shred of comfort in that; it would confuse them, even slow them a fraction, and that might just give him the edge he needed—

Then Sir Mosby bore on his shoulder the banner of the Mothers
’
Union in St Swithun
’
s Churchyard
—

He pretended to be wrapped in his own ecclesiastical thoughts as he walked down the path, delaying noticing them until the last moment. He must get the words as well as the accent right, which according to Doc McCaslin’s formula for speaking British English meant that he had to speak from the front of his mouth in fragmented sentences.

“Luverly mornin’.” He beamed at them over his spectacles.

No reply. Tall and Thin wore a neat grey suit, Thickset the rumpled overalls of a working man. Harry Finsterwald showed no sign of recognition. Range, maybe eight or nine yards.

“Church is open to visitors,” he said. Thickset was holding his right hand rather awkwardly behind his back.

Tall and Thin nodded, returning his smile. “Thank you. But we’re just looking around.”

Mosby cupped his ear with his free hand and stepped off the path towards them. “Beg your pardon?”

“I said ‘we’re just looking around’,” repeated Tall and Thin clearly.

“Looking round?” Mosby echoed the words vaguely. Thickset swayed nervously, but held his ground, one eye firmly fixed on Harry. “Looking round… I see…” He bobbed his head at Tall and Thin, half turning his back on Thickset and Harry as though he had written them off as sources of conversation. “Must see the interiah of the church, then—can show you round if you wish.” He slid the banner from his shoulder as he spoke, letting the shaft rest on the grass. “Stained glass very fine.”

Tall and Thin looked at him for a moment with just the beginning of a frown creasing his brow. It could be he’d exaggerated the accent too much, or it could be simple annoyance at his inconvenient appearance. The next few seconds would show which.

“That’s very good of you, sir.” There was a slightly guttural quality to the ‘g’ which reassured Mosby more than the words themselves; a foreigner would be far less likely than a native Englishman to question his authenticity. “But we must be on our way very soon, I am afraid.”

Mosby smiled and shrugged. “Of course, of course… quite understand… some other time, perhaps… Well, good day to you, then.” He nodded to the man, lifting the banner with both hands as he did so as if about to set it back on his shoulder. At the same time he began to turn slowly towards Thickset and Harry.

“And good day to you—“ he continued, still smiling.

Thickset’s attention was still divided by the need to watch Harry, and as if he understood Mosby’s intentions Harry chose that precise instant to take a larger share of it by shifting his feet.

As Thickset’s eyes left him momentarily, Mosby sprang towards him, swinging the banner off his shoulder in a great sweeping arc. For one terrible fraction of a second, as the man’s reflexes triggered him backwards, it looked to Mosby as though the swing would miss by inches—and as he moved, Thickset’s gun hand came into view, swinging from behind his back on the opposite course.

But fast though he was, Thickset couldn’t quite make up for that lost moment: the gun was still short of its target when the accelerating banner struck him just above the ear. Mosby had put every last ounce of strength into the sweep for the sake of speed as much as force; he felt the shaft bend and then snap like a rotten branch. The pistol flew out of Thickset’s hand and Harry Finsterwald dived for it like an Olympic swimmer. Tall and Thin came back into view, clawing inside his waistband as Mosby reversed his momentum. He ducked as Mosby hurled the broken stump of banner at him and got his gun clear just as Harry squeezed off his first shot. The bullet spun Tall and Thin round and threw him against a tombstone in a tangle of windmilling arms and legs. For a moment the stone supported him, then he rolled off it on to the grass.

Mosby turned back towards Thickset, but saw no sign of movement. He felt suddenly drained of energy, and more frightened than he had been even during the walk down the gravel pathway from the church. Now that it was over he could see the risk he had taken: he had allowed his better judgment of the odds to be overturned by a sudden harebrained idea which had seemed smart, but which had been plain madness. And he had been delivered from the consequences of his folly by good luck and Harry Finsterwald’s snap-shooting.

He watched Harry examine the ruin of Tall and Thin.

Finally Harry straightened up and turned towards him.

“This guy’s had it,” he called across. That was no surprise to Mosby. There had been something about the way Tall and Thin’s body had behaved after the bullet had struck which had suggested a puppet with all the strings irrevocably cut. The only surprise was that Harry’s voice was cracked and shaky.

He was glad that he’d had the banner instead of the gun.

Not that Thickset wasn’t going to have one hell of a headache, he decided as he walked towards the recumbent figure. The blow had spun him halfway back to the path, so that he’d come to rest face down almost in the shadow of Geo. Pratley’s tombstone, and he was still out cold.

He knelt beside the body with a sigh. An unconscious prisoner was also going to be a headache for them too, much more so than a conscious, self-propelled one—

Oh God!

He stared in horror at the one eye he could see, an eye that was open and staring.

The man couldn’t be dead, he couldn’t be. The blow had been hard, but the tightly-furled banner itself ought to have cushioned the shock, and the snapping of the shaft ought to have taken the killing force out of it. He couldn’t be dead.

Harry came up beside him.

“What’s the matter, Doc?”

Mosby swallowed the sickness in his throat. “I think he’s dead too.”

Harry knelt down on the far side of the body and gently felt the neck pulse. Mosby heard him breathe out.

They stared at each other.

“That’s about as dead as you can get,” admitted Harry huskily.

“He can’t be.”

“I guess you don’t know your own strength, Doc. You caved in the side of his skull like an eggshell.”

Mosby gave an uncontrollable shiver.

“Come on, Doc,” said Harry Finsterwald gently, “we couldn’t help ourselves, you know that. These guys, they weren’t going to just kick my ass and send me home—remember how Davies got it. You hadn’t shown up, I’d ‘uv gotten a piece of the same, you better believe it. So we just evened the score, is all.” He paused and looked around him, frowning. “But what we have to do now is get them out of sight, and quick.”

Mosby came back to immediate reality abruptly. This was neither the time nor the setting for conscience pangs: no matter it was a graveyard, it was no place to be caught squatting beside the brand-new corpses of their victims. Any moment now the vicar—or maybe the entire Mothers’ Union—might come trotting up the path to the church, and then they’d have a fully-grown international incident on their hands as well as a glitched mission.

He stood up quickly, ripping the dog-collar from his neck and stuffing it into his coat pocket together with the spectacles. Apart from the bodies and the broken banner midway between them the scene was as peaceful as before; the insects still buzzed and even the blackbirds were back, squabbling among themselves near the overgrown south-east corner. Their outrageous luck was still holding.

“I can get the car up here and stash them in the trunk,” said Finsterwald. “Once I’ve gotten them back on base I can handle them. But we got to get them out of sight first.”

Mosby was aware that he was being jollied out of shock and into action. Maybe Harry Finsterwald wasn’t so bad after all when it came to the crunch—maybe he was starting to repay the debt he owed Mosby for the preservation of his skin. Or perhaps he himself was naturally trying to see the best side of the skin he’d saved.

None of which mattered, compared with the need to tidy up St Swithun’s Churchyard.

He pointed towards the south-east corner, where ecology had produced a fine crop of shoulder high nettles.

“Over there,” he said. The ‘Do not disturb’ request on the notice should keep the dead men private for long enough, and if ecology implied survival of the fittest as well as the natural chain of living and dying they wouldn’t be too out of place there anyway.

Finsterwald nodded. “Okay. You take the feet, Doc.”

SHIRLEY LOOKED ONLY
briefly at Mosby before dumping her bag and pile of parcels on her bed.

“Take your dirty shoes off the quilt, honey—you’re not at home now.”

Mosby eased his shoes off with his toes and raised himself slightly in order to get a better view of things to come.

“Harry give you a bad time?” She stripped off her dress and seated herself at the dressing table.

“Harry’s not so bad.”

“He’s not?” She examined her face in the mirror. “You mean he came up with something on Bullitt?”