‘Yes,’ said Roger, ‘I choose to call myself Roger Farrar.’
‘But, of course. I quite understand. You couldn’t afford your real name appearing on some academic list or other if you wanted to stay concealed so near my eagle eye. I can forgive that.’
The sword point retreated three-eighths of an inch.
‘Well, what do you want?’ Roger said.
‘You. I want you. I want you back.’
‘Well, you can go on wanting.’
A slight return of aggressive instinct.
The hard eyes in the puffy pink flesh narrowed.
‘I mean you to come back,’ the Bosun said.
‘All right, I can see that you’re very determined. But I’m equally determined. I am not coming back. The whole Leeds project is evil. Evil. I mean to have no part in it.’
The Bosun lowered his sword.
‘You know,’ he said in a conversational tone, ‘I think you don’t quite appreciate the difference between us. You tell me you are as much determined to stay here as I am that you shall come back to Leeds. But you lack the necessary ruthlessness, my dear chap. Don’t forget, I know all about you. You didn’t work under me all those years for nothing.’
‘Perhaps I’m different now.’
‘The tiny curving smile in the balloon face.
‘We shall see. I want you back. I’m prepared to go to quite considerable lengths to get you. I’m prepared if necessary to accept damaged goods, to damage them myself even, provided that they can be repaired when we all get back to Leeds.’
‘I warn you: threats won’t do you any good.’
‘Oh, I never supposed they would. But I wasn’t threatening: I was promising.’
The sword blade flicked up again. Pointing higher this time. On a level with Roger’s eyes but held to the side of his face.
‘Let me teach you a little lesson,’ the Bosun said.
The even tone of the piping voice.
The sword moving evenly forward.
The sharp pain at the edge of Roger’s ear.
He jerked his head aside.
‘Oh, come,’ said the Bosun, ‘keep still. Less melodrama. It was only the merest nick. You’ve done worse shaving.’
The sword darting back and darting forward again. Held now level with the other ear.
‘Now, you’d better exercise a little more self-control this time, or you might find yourself without an ear.’
Roger staring at a point just above the Bosun’s head, fixed on the curl of a medieval crozier fastened to the distant wall. The rigid face. White, gleaming pallidly with sweat.
The sword slowly moving forward. The expected burning touch of pain at the ear edge.
The sword lowered. A dark stain marring the straight shining blade.
‘You see, my dear chap,’ the Bosun said, ‘it’s this way: your friend Eric knew too much to be allowed to live, but you know too much to be allowed to die.’
‘I don’t want to bandy riddles,’ Roger said.
Sullenly.
The Bosun pouted. A spoilt child, blown-up.
‘You used to enjoy a certain allusiveness in conversation in the old days,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Roger, ‘not sentimentality, please.’
‘But they were good old days. They still are good days. I cannot understand what possessed you to go running off like that.’
A shimmer of wrinkles on the broad balloon brow. Genuine incomprehension.
‘Look,’ the Bosun said, ‘I’m asking you to come back. That’s what I’m here for. I’m sorry about your Eric, but, as I said, he knew too much. Anyone from the spearhead team was just too important to take risks over. Even though he gave nothing away it was too dangerous to allow him to continue to exist.’
The podgy fingers waving in a gesture of deprecation.
‘But you’re different, old man. Naturally, I wouldn’t be too delighted to have details of what your branch was doing fall into the wrong hands. But you’ve evidently decided to say nothing of the grand design. That was sensible. And the fact is that we cannot do without your knowledge of linguistics. There’s no one at Leeds to touch you, dear boy. Please, won’t you come back. Please.’
‘You make me sick,’ Roger said. ‘Pleading for your vile institute as if it were a home for lost dogs. That’s why we had to leave the way we did, to go to ground, to disappear: you would never have been within miles of understanding our reasons.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the Bosun sharply. ‘I understand your reasons perfectly well. With the late – er – Eric Smith it was lack of promotion, but then he never rated it. And with you it was simply a craving for public recognition. Well, you know the diffic –’
‘Listen to me, just listen. Just try to take in what I’m saying.’
Roger shouting into the pink balloon face.
‘I disagree with your whole show, fundamentally and absolutely. The foul experiments that went on just round the corner and spending my every waking hour tinkering with words for what you were pleased to call warlike purposes. It was making me sick, sick to death.’
On the pink face the almost imperceptible pale gold eyebrows rose.
‘It was lack of leisure, was it?’ the Bosun said. ‘My dear fellow, I confess I’d got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick. But if you want extra time off I’m sure it could be arranged. Of course, as you know, we’ve a hell of a lot to do and time is always precious. We’ve got to get this thing perfected, you know. Then we can beat them all.’
‘Beat them all. That just about sums you up. That’s the only way you know how to think. The new way of warfare. Britain must have the edge on everybody.’
‘My dear fellow, are you saying that that shouldn’t be so? Ireland must have softened your brain. Just think back to the fundamentals. You wouldn’t want to see Russia winning a war, would you? Or America, for heaven’s sake. Come, you must know Britain, with all her faults, is the only power fit to be trusted.’
‘The only power. That’s the sort of blindness I sought refuge here from. Can’t you see: linguistics should never be part of a secret weapon? It’s criminal to think in that way.’
‘Linguistics for peace, eh? Ireland has done something to your mind. It must be the soft days, as they call them. The gradual seepage of fine mist into the cerebellum. The sooner you come back to Leeds and a little realism the better. That sort of slogan stuff is simply one of the elementary tools of your own trade: you can’t allow yourself to be deceived by it. It’s like a master carpenter hitting his finger with a hammer.’
‘I didn’t work for months on the uses of the word “peace” without knowing it was a weapon, thank you very much. That’s just why it took me so long to see it also meant something. It isn’t only a word, you know: it’s something that could exist. And the same goes for all the other words you so much love to see being monkeyed around with by stupid stooges like me. Well, I’m no longer a stooge. Ireland has done something for me, if you like. It’s given me a chance to look at you from a distance.’
‘A distance? My dear chap, we shall have to give you some sort of rehabilitation course. You can’t surely really think that Ireland is distant from Britain. Why, that’s the crudest sort of propaganda put out in the pre-scientific days. You of all people can’t have fallen for it.’
‘It happens to be true. Ireland actually is a different country from your set-up over there.’
The Bosun smiled.
‘My dear fellow, Ireland is simply the last English eccentricity. Just wake up.’
‘No, you don’t see it. Ireland is a place where things can be done slowly and carefully. Where little by little –’
‘Stop.’
The slit mouth curving into a slow smile.
‘Little by Little. It’s been puzzling me ever since I heard those ridiculous names you two gave yourselves. I suppose they were your idea. It’s the book by Dean Farrar, of course. The author provided your surname, and Smith’s Christian na
me came from the title, “Eric, or Little by Little”. My dear fellow, I do congratulate you, a really pretty conceit.’
The curved slit mouth straightened.
‘Only the philosophy behind it simply won’t do, of course. If we went about doing everything little by little we’d lose out in a couple of years. My dear chap, it’s all or nothing, you know. There’s not room in the world for anything else. And of course …’
The high, piping voice dropped to quietness.
‘… of course, it’s all or nothing for you too.’
Chapter Six
Suddenly the Bosun stopped. The great blimp canting awkwardly forward.
He scrabbled at the ornamental sheath of the swordstick with fat, ineffectual fingers and at last succeeded in getting a grip on it. He straightened up and made an effort to return the sword to its home.
His hands trembling from the strain of bending. The dark smear on the edge of the blade lost at last in the sheath. He looked over at Roger.
‘You’d better use your handkerchief on those ears,’ he said. ‘You’re dripping blood all over the floor.’
Roger mechanically feeling in his pocket, pulling out a handkerchief, dabbing at the two wounds. Conscious that the handkerchief had not been white in the first place.
‘I think we’ll finish our conversation elsewhere,’ the Bosun said. ‘I don’t like the sight of blood you know.’
He gestured with the ornamental stick at the spattered drops on the floor and then towards the inner depths of the museum. Roger went in the direction he had indicated.
In the faint warmth a sudden profuse sweating. With every movement his trunk stuck momentarily to his vest.
And padding after him came the Bosun, walking very softly in spite of his enormous size as if his puffed-out body was really filled with some lighter-than-air gas.
‘This will do.’
Roger came to a halt at the foot of a small winding staircase with running through its well a thin section cut from a peat bog, light brown at the top grading down to near blackness at the bottom. He yielded to an irresistible temptation to sink down and sit on the second stair.
He put his head between his hands and waited till he felt better able to deal with the situation once again.
The Bosun gave a sharp little cough and he looked up.
The Bosun was standing fat legs astraddle, looking speculatively down at him. The startling tented overcoat hung wide showing the top trouser button open as usual and a patch of white shirt billowing out like the sail of a great East Indiaman running before a fair wind.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘I can’t spend all day idling here. It’s bloody depressing, you know.’
He looked round belligerently.
‘They want to clear ninety per cent of this appalling junk out. A museum is a scientific instrument, not a national reliquary. Look at that absurd slice of bog beside you. Only the Irish could wish to remind themselves of the slime they have scarcely dragged themselves out of.’
Roger looked at the strip of peat in its long, narrow glass case with the wooden measured rule running up into the gloom high above his head.
‘It interests me,’ he said.
The Bosun puffed out a long scornful breath. His little pursed-up cherub’s lips.
‘It’s certainly time you left Ireland,’ he said. ‘But we don’t want to create a lot of fuss. Discretion is the thing to aim for. So you’d better take your time. Put in your resignation from that tinpot academic establishment and pay your bills, and I’ll book you a seat in the Manchester plane for next Saturday. In the meanwhile I shall stay to keep a friendly eye on you.’
Roger’s wintry smile in the winter gloom of the museum.
‘And what about the murder you’ve committed?’ he said.
One of the attendants tramped by. His footsteps clonking hollowly. He blew on his hands.
Roger waited till he had turned the corner.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I ought to have realized that you hadn’t really got any serious designs on my life. I should have known that you wouldn’t have been within a hundred miles of the spot if you had decided to have me killed.’
‘Now then, don’t get uppish. I’ve shown you once that I don’t mind hurting people. Next time I shall hurt you rather more.’
Roger shook his head in disagreement.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You went about as far as you could. Anything more and you’d have been bound to have drawn attention to yourself. If this was England you might be able to pull strings and hush things up. But it isn’t England: it’s Ireland. There are plenty of people here who would be very pleased to show up the British Government in a nasty light. So the cards are by no means all stacked in your favour.’
The Bosun’s face looking down at him, deep pinky red, balloon-shaped, with the pale gold hair scarcely visible in the murk of the museum. The tiny slit mouth was closed hard, making a short uncompromising gash.
‘Listen,’ he said in a hissing whisper, ‘I need you at Leeds. I make no attempt to disguise it. You could speed things up a lot, and I want them speeded up. But, if it comes to choosing between you and the safety of the whole enterprise, you don’t count for as much as that.’
The pudgy fingers snapping in the chill air.
‘I dealt with your friend Eric,’ he went on, raising his voice slightly, ‘and I shan’t hesitate, if you drive me to it, to deal with you.’
‘If I’ve kept my mouth shut for three years,’ Roger said, ‘it’s pretty likely, isn’t it, that I’ll go on keeping it shut? That was the condition Eric and I made between us when we left. We reckoned we were entitled to chuck it all provided we didn’t betray any trust. Why else do you think I took that card from Eric’s body? I could have told the Guards what it meant. When I saw Eric lying there dead, that was my first thought. But in the end I decided our unwritten compact still stood. If I said nothing about the work at Leeds I was justified in opting out.’
He gripped the cool glass of the display case beside him.
‘It was a simple personal decision,’ he went on. ‘When you start going beyond that, you end up saying “All of us are right, and all of you are wrong.” That’s what you’ve done. I’m not going to do the same thing.’
A faint frown on the bulging flesh above the pale gold eyebrows.
‘Dear me, I can see I have miscalculated a little. Yours is really quite a serious case. I shall have to speak to my informant. I’ve been led astray.’
‘Your informant?’
A dart of unease. The unknown eye, the hidden microphone, the two-way mirror.
The Bosun smiled. His slit mouth curving almost into a semi-circle.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ he said. ‘I had to leave an informant. I needed access to your records at the School of Further Studies. I needed to know if either of you had used any material you had worked on under my aegis. Indeed, my – er representative is still with you. If I called them off, it would give away my little secret. And I never like to do that.’
‘So there’s a traitor.’
‘Traitor? Isn’t that a little strong?’
‘No, it is not. Not to my mind. The School is one point of sanity in a world gone mad. The thought of a hireling of you totalist megalomaniacs working there revolts me.’
‘Now, you’ve got to get these ideas out of your head. After all, you’ll be working for a totalist megalomaniac yourself again in a few days – if I may so describe myself.’
‘I will not be working for you. Understand that. I have left you and all you represent for ever. My last concern with you will be to get rid of this traitor you have infiltrated into my world, this infiltraitor, if you like –’
‘My dear fellow, I do like. I like very much. Infiltraitor. You’ve lost nothing of your touch with the words. You must come back.’
‘No.’
The shout echoing in the high deserted halls of the museum.
The Bosun waited for i
t to die away. Then he smiled.
A bloated cat.
‘There is one thing I think you really ought to bear in mind,’ he said. ‘You know it was my Infiltraitor – what a splendid word – who acted for me over your friend Eric. I wouldn’t want to get them to act over you.’
‘A murderer too, I might have guessed it.’
‘Well, that’s a ticklish point actually. You see the little episode of the poison in the stout bottle was presented as a mere practical joke. The stuff was always spoken of as The Emetic. Now I can’t for the life of me be sure whether my Infiltraitor knew beforehand what the stuff really was or not. If he did, he was a murderer, as you say. But if not, he was only a very sensible accessory after the fact.’
The Bosun’s pudgy fingers brushing the point aside in the chill air.
‘But all this is neither here nor there,’ he went on. ‘The point is that I’ve been led into handling you wrongly. I had no idea, absolutely no idea, that you had this extraordinary sentimental attachment to your place of work. I thought it was just a convenient, even rather clever, hideyhole for you. That was why I tried to frighten you. With the card, you know, and then putting my docker friend on to pursue you in that bloodhoundy way all over the place –’
‘So I was meant to spot him?’
‘Of course.’
‘And was I to tell the Guards that I had?’
‘The Guards? You mean the police? You told them?’
Roger heaved himself up off the stair he had been sitting on.
‘Certainly I told them,’ he said. ‘I thought it was just possible that he came from them, I had to check. And, of course, it makes no difference because I told the man in charge of the case that I would see him at the inquest. It’s at twelve o’clock. If I don’t go at once I shall be late. And if I don’t turn up at all, what will he think?’
The Bosun gave a brief smile.
‘You seem to have won this round, my dear fellow. I saw that the inquest was today. I certainly shan’t attempt to detain you. However I expect I shall see you again before I leave for Leeds.’
The slit mouth hardening.
The Dog It Was That Died Page 6