Soldier No More (19 page)

Roche shrugged modestly. “I didn’t do anything. I just smiled at her.”

“Smiled at her! Wait until I tell Jilly and Steffy—she positively
drooled
over you, darling! Do you know what you’ve done—do you?” Lexy brushed ineffectually at the blonde tangle which had fallen over her eyes. “That was Madame Goutard—La Goutard in person! No one’s
ever
unfrozen her— not even David Audley, le Grand David.”

“Madame Goutard?”

“La Goutard—Madame Peyrony’s bosom friend. They get together three times a week at the chateau, allegedly for tea … I think they swop spells and work out who’s next for the evil eye and the ague. But you charmed her… I swear she even almost smiled at me! And she’ll be on the phone to La Peyrony, with a bit of luck, telling her that at last we’ve rustled up a decent and respectable young gentleman to look after us, and that’ll put us in good with La Peyrony—she thinks the sun rises and sets by what La Goutard says … What
did
you say to her?”

Roche spread his hands. This was evidently one of those days when he could do no wrong. “I just talked to her …”

“Well, you said the magic word.” Lexy brushed at the tangle again, with a hand only a little less grubby for its immersion in the Dordogne river. “And like a native too—perhaps that’s what did it. The Great David knows all the words, but half the time no one seems to understand what he’s saying … and one look from La Goutard and I just dry up completely. But you were absolutely
super!!
”
She gave Roche a huge, dazzling smile. “
And
you paid for everything—“ She plunged the paw into her handbag, which was the size of a haversack, and rummaged among its contents until she had gathered a fistful of creased and equally dirty banknotes.

Roche shook his head. “That’s my contribution to the housekeeping, Lady Alexandra. I insist.”

She blinked at him. “Please don’t call me
Lady
. My umpteenth great grandmother—great times ten, but not good—was one of Charles II’s innumerable mistresses, that’s the origin of Father’s title, and every time anyone calls me
Lady
it only reminds me that I’m a lady neither by merit nor inclination—especially as Father says I’m a throwback to the founding mistress of our line … At least I can pay for the wine, yes?”

She was gorgeous, dirty hands and tangled hair and every other buttgn still undone, thought Roche protectively. Cleaned up and well-dressed… if she was a ringer for one of the Black Boy’s playmates then no wonder the King had succumbed to her ancestor. As she was, she was no less irresistible, dirt and tangle and all.

But he had work to do. And dirtier and more tangled work too. He waved away the banknotes. “I thought I might take a few bottles to—what’s his name?—David Audley and his friends, if they’re giving me room to pitch my tent among them—“

“A few bottles?” Lexy laughed. “Darling, that’d be coals to Newcastle— they’re permanently
awash
in booze at the Tower, they live in an absolute haze of alcohol and intellectual conversation. But you don’t need to worry, because they can be jolly—and when I tell them about La Goutard
fetching
over you they’ll welcome you with open arms … and open bottles.” She grasped the door handle of the Volkswagen. “Did you make your rules-and-regulations phone call okay? Because I can’t wait to tell Jilly and Steffy the great news of your conquest.”

Roche looked at his watch. “Ah… I had a bit of trouble there—the lines all engaged, or something—so if I could try again in a few minutes … You can show me the sights of the town in the meantime, maybe?”

Lexy shrugged. “A few minutes is about right, darling … because there isn’t anything worth seeing, except the church, so they say … but I’ve seen it, and it isn’t worth seeing either—it’s more like a castle than a church—“

Roche kept a straight face. That, of course, was why the church of Saint-Maur was worth seeing, precisely: it was a perfect
bastide
church, with its four flanking towers and parapet walks, and the downward-slanted loopholes with their stirrup-shaped bases giving the defending archers wider fields of fire—an innovation (according to the Thompson notes he had studied on the train) which a
b
astide-expert
like Captain Roche would unerringly identify as a legacy of 12th century crusading experience.

But all that would be lost on Lexy, whose historical knowledge most likely ended in King Charles II’s 17th century bed … and who was now reaching half-proprietorially, half-shyly, for his hand with one of those grubby paws of hers.

But at the last moment she thought better of it. Instead she raised both the paws for his inspection.

“Oh God—just look at me! Father always says that I attract grime … but this is thanks to David, damn him!”

Roche couldn’t avoid examining the hands of Lady Alexandra Perowne, which at close quarters resembled those of a garage mechanic, black-stained and calloused, and broken-nailed.

“That’s bloody David’s bloody engine oil!” exclaimed Lady Alexandra hotly. “He thinks bloody cars run on petrol, faith and hope, and never a drop of oil or water, that’s what he thinks! He’s the cleverest man I’ve ever met—and he’s an absolute bloody
idiot
with
cars.”

So here was another curious and unexpected insight into David Longsdon Audley, then.

In itself it was hardly important—that the man didn’t have the skills one might have expected of an ex-tank commander. But—what was important—it warned him of how little he really knew about the man even though he knew so much that others didn’t know.

He looked up for a moment, away from Lexy’s oil-stained hands which the river had failed to clean, and caught a glimpse of one of Saint-Maur’s towers through a gap in the roof-line. Then he forced his eyes and his mind back to the hands.

“You do his car maintenance for him?”

“Well,
he
can’t do it. And the others
won
’
t
—not even Davey Stein, who’s supposed to know all about aeroplane engines… and Mike’s even worse— he was in the engineers during the war, he’s always telling us, too—but he won’t even hold a bloody spanner for me. I tell you, darling—they’ll have me sweeping the chimney and rodding their drains for them before they’ve finished … Not that I couldn’t do both those things—the trick is to keep turning the rods clockwise.” She frowned at him suddenly. “Or is it anticlockwise?”

Roche couldn’t help smiling at her. The three men had quite obviously got her hog-tied into doing their dirty work, but an informed guess suggested that she had held the ropes while they tied the knots—that what Lady Alexandra needed most was to be needed in some role other than in bed; and if that involved crawling under a car, rather than into the back seat of it, then she’d require even less encouragement for the former than the latter. Protests notwithstanding, Lexy was doing what came naturally, and was happy with it.

And David Roche still had work to do, natural or unnatural. “Davey?”

Lexy snorted. “Yes—I can see life’s going to get rather complicated, with all these different Davids … Davey Stein, I mean—Colonel David Stein— every time the Israelis have a war, they put him up a rank, so he’ll be a general next time, David says—oops! I meant David
Audley
that time— sorry!”

“He’s in the Israeli air force?” Roche judged that a little intelligent interpretation of Lexy’s stream-of-consciousness monologues would not go amiss.

“Well—no. I mean … he’s not a regular, like you. What David—David
Audley
, darn it!—what David says is, every time Davey hears gunfire in the Middle East he just grabs the nearest plane and takes off… But he was in the RAF during the war, taking pictures—he flew Spitfires and things, you know…”

“He was in photographic reconnaissance?”

“Uh-huh, something like that. Shooting pictures, not people, is how David puts it, anyway.”

What David Audley said, and how he put things, appeared to dominate Lexy’s views.

“He smokes a perfectly foul pipe, but apart from that he’s rather a poppet,” continued Lexy. “You’ll like him—he’s frightfully clever, of course. But then they’re all bloody clever—Mike too, in his own quiet way. I’m the only dumb one—the mechanic—“ she exhibited her hands to prove it.

“Mike Bradford—the engineer?”

“During the war he was an engineer. With the American Army—he’s an American, did I tell you?”

Roche shook his head.

“Well, he is. And he was an engineer, though I rather think he was more a blower-up of things than a builder-up, from what he says, if you know what I mean. But he’s a writer now—novels about the war with rude words in them which make a lot of money for him—the novels, I mean, not the rude words … Or maybe it’s the rude words that make the money—David says they’re authentic, anyway. Or almost authentic, because in fact it seems every other word they said in the war was a rude one, and Mike hasn’t gone quite that far.” She frowned at him. “Although I can’t imagine Father effing and blinding all the time … But I suppose it was all different then …
Anyway
…
Mike writes his books and Davey digs up old bones, and then photographs them.”

Roche nodded. The logical thing was to ask her about Audley now, but a more oblique approach would be preferable there. “I see. And they all first met during the war then, did they?”

“Did they?” She brushed at the tangle again with that characteristic gesture of hers. “I don’t know … Were you in the war, David?”

“Do I look old enough?”

She examined him carefully. “Mmm … the question is, are you young-old or old-young? But probably not—not quite.”

Roche half-smiled. “Not their war. Mine was the Korean War.”

“Oh …” She sounded almost disappointed. “That was all that negotiating at Pan-mun-something, wasn’t it?”

Could memories really be so short? thought Roche bitterly.

“I mean, it was a little sort of war,” said Lexy.

“Not so little.” The dark past rose inside Roche. “Not for all the people who died in it. It was a very big war for them.”

“Oh—yes, of course!” Her face fell, and it was like the sun going behind a cloud. “I’m sorry, David—that was silly of me. Forgive me.”

With an effort, Roche pasted the half-smile back on his face. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Compared with theirs it was a little war. And a long way away.”

And besides, the wench is dead!
The
same words always came back to him when he was with another woman, sooner or later.

She looked at him uncertainly, still contrite.

“Mind you, it could have been a big war.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to change the subject, but he could drive it forward, like a barbed arrow in his flesh which could only be extracted by pushing it clear through him. “It could have been the biggest of all—if MacArthur had dropped the Bomb on the Chinese.”

“The bomb?”

“The atomic bomb. He wanted to, you know. But fortunately he got the push instead.”

Lexy brightened. “Instead of dropping the Bomb, he got dropped!” she exclaimed.

The half-smile wasn’t so difficult now. “Who says you’re dumb? That’s good.”

She grinned at him ruefully. “It may be good, but it isn’t me—it’s David. And the trouble is, I ought to be an authority on your Korean War. We had a whole orgy on it a few days ago—it was Jilly’s orgy, because she was mixed up in all those endless talks at Geneva or somewhere, not long after she joined the Foreign Office or whatever, and she knows all about it… Only … only, the minute she started talking I went straight to sleep, and I didn’t wake up until the end almost, when David was on about General MacArthur getting dropped instead of the atomic bomb.” She shook her blonde tangle at Roche. “You’ve got to face it, David—I’m
hopeless
, absolutely
hopeless.
”

Roche was feeling helpless, rather than hopeless. The idea of a
whole
orgy
on the Korean War, as observed by a very junior Foreign Office clerk just down from Oxford University, boggled his mind. Clearly, whatever activities transpired at the Orgies in the Tower, they were far removed from those of Nero and Caligula.

He looked at his watch, and discovered that he was late for his second contact.

The second contact was a different one, and it was quite unmistakable, even allowing for the distortions of distance and technology. Accentless, passionless, almost sexless.
Genghis Khan
.

“This is Johnnie—you understand?”

Absurdly, Roche smelt a faint fragrance of roses—a foully-cloying memory-smell of the spray of blooms under the lancet window of the little Sussex church, from behind which Genghis Khan had stepped. And it was the wrong church—it was too little and respectably Victorian, and altogether too far from the Genghis Khan reality: the
bastide
fortress-church of Saint-Maur de Neuville was Genghis Khan’s church—not where he would have worshipped, but which he would have stormed and desecrated and burnt in the midst of dead children and screaming women, better dead—

“Are you there? Do you hear me?” Still no passion, no anger, even though the questions should have contained some emotion, urgency atjhe least.

“Yes.” Even with nothing to signpost it, this was a very different voice from the obsequious and deferential voice of the first contact.

“Then listen. Once only I will say. First, there is a man to beware— Raymond Galles—G-A-L-L-E-S—garage proprietor of Les Mustiques, near Les Ezyies. He was a British agent, he may still be one.”

Oh—
shi
t!

“Yes?”

“Very well!
Subject—
Stein, David Aaron, reserve colonel, Heil Avir Le Israel—“

Genghis Khan wasn’t wasting any time.

“—formerly flight-lieutenant, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, DFC 1944; at present Fellow of Rylands College, Cambridge, university lecturer in Paleolithic Art; nothing known—“

“Nothing known?”