For the Good of the State

by Anthony Price

  ‘Tom—?’ Faith Audley’s voice issued from the half-light of another passage.

  ‘Coming!’ Damn the Wars of the Roses! Tom shook his head.

  Another short corridor, with a laundry room on one side and a larder on the other, and other doors—for the extremes of boiler and freezer, maybe—?

  Tom blinked as the light streaming through the last door hit him, and stepped out of the house in Faith Audley’s wake, following her under another stone archway which had never started its life in a kitchen garden wall, its crudely defaced heraldic shields reminding him of the bigger arch above the barn doors.

  Then the full sun hit him as he emerged from the archway into a little courtyard at the back of the house, with a stone well-head in the centre of it and a fine view of the high downland away across a coarse winter lawn in the foreground.

  But no sign of Audley—? He frowned towards the man’s wife.

  ‘This is the first good day we’ve had, when it hasn’t rained much—’ She wasn’t looking at him, but at the grass ‘—but does he prune the roses? Oh no!’ She turned to him at last, sniffing the air as she did so. ‘He has to make a bonfire … and if the wind stays in this direction … we shall get the benefit of it—’ She swung round to look at the house ‘—in fact, I’d better go and close all the windows before it’s too late—excuse me, Sir Thomas—Tom … But I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea while I’m about it. David will be here directly.’ She indicated the nearest of a group of dirt-stained white ironwork chairs. ‘He knows I was bringing you here.’

  Tom wondered what Research and Development had passed on to Audley about him, in preparation for this meeting. Whatever it was, it ought to be about him, not Panin, because Jaggard had indicated that the Russian had arrived unobtrusively, by agreement with the FCO. But R & D had ways of knowing things, Harvey had warned; and it would certainly know all about one Thomas Arkenshaw, Harvey had added nastily: ‘He probably knows more about you than we know — and maybe more than you’ll find comfortable, old boy!’

  So what? thought Tom. considering the grimy seat of the chair. It looked as though it hadn’t been sat on since last summer, and although he might have parked his castle-exploring denims of this morning on it he wasn’t about to mess up the good suit he had packed for tonight’s dinner-with-Willy that would never take place. Instead, he sauntered across the yard—it was more a terrace than a yard, separated from the lawn above it by a low stone wall—until he reached the well, which was completely equipped with a rusty winder and an antique wooden bucket on a chain. Idly, he picked up a small piece of flaked stone from the rim and dropped it in.

  One, two—plop!

  ‘Hullo, there! Arkenshaw, I presume?’

  Tom controlled his involuntary start of guilt at being caught throwing something into another man’s well: there were parts of the world where that rated a bullet in the back. Also, he had somehow expected Audley to come from the direction of the lawn, rather than from behind him.

  A slow innocent turn was required, anyway.

  ‘Good afternoon, Dr Audley.’ “Big, ugly old devil‘, Harvey had said off-handedly, and all those adjectives filled David Audley’s bill exactly: in his gardening clothes, which had not seen better days for many years, he resembled nothing so much as an ageing Irish navvy who had done his share of fighting for pounds and pints on the old fairground circuit of his native land. So that makes two of us, thought Tom, who don’t look like themselves! ’Im sorry to descend on you like this.‘ That was what Jaggard had said to him; only this time it was no lie. ’But you’ve had a phone-call, I gather.‘

  ‘I have.’ Audley advanced across the terrace in his enormous navvy’s gumboots, which looked as though they had steel toe-caps, until he was able to look down on Tom from close quarters from his six-foot four. ‘But I won’t shake your hand.’

  ‘No?’ What confused Tom was that the big man’s intense scrutiny of him was nevertheless not in the least hostile—if anything his expression was as innocently friendly as his battered features allowed. ‘Well, you don’t have to—’ He stopped as Audley’s hands came up, palms upwards.

  ‘I’ve been making a bonfire.’ Audley presented two massive, dirt-encrusted paws. ‘So I’m not really fit for decent company—my wife won’t even let me in her kitchen. She says I’m like “Pig-pen” in Peanuts.’ He grinned a huge grin. ‘Charlie Brown—? She’s a Charlie Brown addict, is my wife.’ He chuckled. ‘I see myself rather as Schroeder, the intellectual one—with her as Lucy, because she packs a mean right hook. But she sees me as “Pig-pen”—we never see ourselves as others see us, do we?’

  Tom struggled against an enveloping sense of unreality. The idea of the willowy, blue-blooded Mrs Audley, pale and fragile, packing any sort of punch … the idea of her in those huge hands, bear-hugged … was incongruous to the point of disbelief. And there was also the unlikely offspring of this unlikely union, and Tripoli too, in the back of his mind.

  But there was another explanation to all this, which was tripping him before he’d started to move: one thing Jaggard and Harvey and rumour were agreed on was that Audley was tricky. So he had to be tricky too!

  ‘Your daughter packs a mean punch too, Dr Audley.’ He grinned back at the man.

  ‘She does?’ Audley hadn’t expected that reply. ‘She does—yes.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. She had me with a reference to “Tripoli”—in relation to George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Arken-shaw. But I shall have to work it out before I take you away from your bonfire, anyway.’ Another possibility opened up. ‘And I suppose I should be glad that it was a bonfire and not a well-rotted compost heap—?’

  Audley stared at him, momentarily off-put. Then his eyes softened, and he smiled the ugly man’s smile—the legendary smile Tom had heard of, which had softened women down the ages according to Willy.

  ‘Ah! Now I see it!’ Audley nodded at him. ‘I didn’t see it at first … and I don’t really see it now—the resemblance. But it’s there in the mind—Danny—and now Tom Arkenshaw!’

  ‘It?’ Tom realized that Audley had been too quick for him. ‘What resemblance?’ The second question came out before he could stop it. ‘Danny?’ The third was too closely-coupled to the second, damn it!

  ‘Danuta—Danushia … or Danka—?’ Audley closed his eyes for an instant, and when he opened them again he wasn’t looking at Tom at all, but at someone else who wasn’t on the terrace with them, but in another place and another time. ‘But Danny to us, Tom Arkenshaw—Danny Dzieliwski—’ He pronounced the name better than most Englishmen did: Den-chev-less-ka—‘your mum, Tom Arkenshaw—Diana, Lady Arkenshaw, dowager baroness, I suppose that would be now, eh?’ Suddenly Audley’s face was an inscrutably battered mask, like the defaced coat-of-arrns on the archways of his home. ‘Now that she’s sailing under British colours? And whose colours are yours this afternoon, Tom Arkenshaw, I wonder—eh?’

  Bloody Jaggard had miscalculated! was all Tom could think for a moment. If he’d thought that Audley wouldn’t see through this, by God!

  ‘You know my mother, sir?’ He felt dreadfully young now.

  ‘I did.’ Audley’s face was no longer inscrutable—it was brutal now. ‘Don’t mess with me, boy: you may not know that as well as I know it, but you know it well enough. Because that’s why you’re here—because someone thinks I’ll treat you better because of it … Baynham, it could be … It wouldn’t be Jack Butler—he doesn’t play games like that … Or it could be Stacey—or Jaggard … Or, most likely, because he’s inclined that way, it could be Garry Harvey—’ All the time he’d been building his bonfire, out in the orchard since that phone-call, Audley must have been going through the possibilities, against what Research and Development would have told him; but, although he’d got some of them spot on, he hadn’t had enough information for certainty.

  ‘That isn’t why I’m here, sir.’ That was all Tom could manage as he thought I should have phoned up Mother�
��I’m an idiot!

  ‘No?’ Audley grasped the winding handle of the well, and swung it as idly as Tom had thrown the stone into the well, making the chain squeak. ‘But … the bugger of it is that I will treat you better. So whichever of them it is, he’s no fool!’ He dropped the handle. “Tripoli”, she said, did she? Well, you’ll have to work that one out for yourself, I’m afraid!‘ Then he frowned at Tom. ’But as for your long-forgotten—long-forgotten, but never-forgotten—mother, Tom Arkenshaw … how is the dear girl … after longer than either of us would care to remember? She’s well, I hope?‘

  That was more than Tom cared to think about. ‘My mother is very well, sir.’ He had to buy time to think about that, although thinking about Mamusia as a ‘dear girl’ was altogether too much to think about. ‘And my job now is to keep you in the same excellent state of health—that’s why I’m here, Dr Audley.’

  ‘Me?’ Audley sniffed the air suddenly, and Tom was aware that he’d caught the same smell, of that distant bonfire taking hold, ‘What’s that supposed to mean, may I ask?’

  They had come to the point. And it was mercifully a world away from Mother. ‘It means Panin, sir—Nikolai Andrievich Panin.’

  ‘Panin?’ Audley sniffed again, and then relaxed. ‘Well, he doesn’t constitute a health warning, I wouldn’t have thought—?’ Then he frowned at Tom. ‘But you’re diplomatic protection—overseas protection—? How does Nikolai Panin concern you?’

  ‘He’s here in England.’ As Tom nodded he smelt bonfire smoke again. ‘And he wants to talk to you.’

  ‘He does?’ Audley was unrelaxed now. ‘Then he’s your problem, Tom Arkenshaw—not me.’ He sniffed again, and turned suddenly towards the house, as though he had realized what his bonfire was about to do. ‘Damn?

  ‘No, sir—’ Something cracked sharply inside and outside and above Tom’s head, and the French window behind Audley simultaneously exploded into fragments—

  Audley started to jerk back against the splintering window as Tom’s conditioned reflexes reacted out of Beirut experience: with a car bomb when the world fragmented you were already too late—but with the bullet you heard you had one fragment of time before the next one, which you wouldn’t hear, arrived—

  He grabbed the man by whatever he could take hold of—which stretched under his hand for one agonizing delaying instant before taking the strain as he dragged Audley down with him on the stone-flagged terrace, behind the pathetically inadequate protection of the wall, before the next bullet arrived.

  3

  FROM WHERE Tom finished up lying behind his own stretch of wall, he found himself looking directly at Audley across a gap through which three or four stone steps connected the terrace with the lawn. But although they were thus facing each other at about the same distance as a moment before, the unnaturalness of ground level seemed to bring them much closer together, so that he was quite irrelevantly aware first that the big man hadn’t stood very close to his razor before breakfast.

  But then the features beneath the grey stubble annexed all his attention: as he watched them they were contorted into even greater ugliness by what Tom thought for an instant might be a mixture of surprise and fear—but which he knew in the next instant was red, blazing rage, only half a second away from an irrational explosion of movement.

  ‘For Christ’s sake—keep your head down, man.’ What lent urgency to the command was the inadequacy of the wall. ‘Unless you want your great brain spread all over the terrace?’

  Mercifully, the old ploy of the crudely descriptive warning, which he had used in far less desperate circumstances on far less imaginative men, worked well enough with Audley: the glare in his eyes flickered, but then faded as he subsided physically, shrinking down like any sensible man who had suddenly realized what the smallest piece of nickel-plated steel could do at high velocity to flesh and blood and bone. And with Audley there ought to be recollection as well as imagination: it might be half a lifetime or more since he had been under fire, but he had once been in a real war, Tom remembered.

  ‘All right, all right!’ The features twisted again, and then Audley showed his teeth like an old wolf. ‘You think he’ll try a second shot?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tom shifted his position slightly, to get a view of the terrace and the house. The well-head offered secure protection not far away. But where could he go after that?

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be the expert?’ Audley had his second wind now.

  ‘I don’t know where he fired from.’ Tom estimated the distance from the well to the French windows (but they might be locked) … and then to the archway leading to the kitchen passage (but that was too far for safety). ‘You were looking down the garden, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was looking at you, actually. You were telling me how you were going to protect me, as I recall—’ Audley stopped abruptly. ‘I’m sorry! I’m not in practice for this sort of game, Tom Arkenshaw—forgive me!’

  Tom concentrated on the damaged French window. There were two steps up to it, from the terrace, and the bullet had struck high up, at the exact junction of four small lead-lights, driving the lead inwards and cracking others below them. So—

  ‘A long shot,’ said Audley. ‘It was a long shot.’

  ‘How do you know?’ But he was almost certainly right, thought Tom. ‘Or are you trying to reassure me?’

  ‘I’m trying to reassure myself, more like! I don’t know—’ Audley checked himself again, but only for a fraction of a second. ‘Stop there! Not another step, Cathy!’

  Tom shifted his gaze from the smashed window, and saw half of what Audley had seen from where he lay, which was framed in the arch.

  ‘But, Father—’

  ‘Not another step—understand?’ Audley’s voice steadied. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you, Father.’ The visible part of the tea-tray quivered. ‘But I don’t understand you. Is there something— ’ The tray lurched slightly ‘—Father … what on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ The man’s voice was almost conversational now. ‘Not another step—remember? And I mean that. Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She’s shutting the windows,’ Cathy snapped back irritably. ‘To keep out your smoke, Father … And I think she’s just broken the one that sticks, in the little bedroom— I heard the glass go … So she’s not going to be very pleased with you, because she’s been asking you for ages to make it easier to close.’ She paused only for an instant. ‘Is there something I can’t see, that I’m about to step on? Because this tray weighs a ton!’

  ‘Go—’ Audley choked slightly on the word, and Tom sympathized with him as he cleared his throat ‘—go back to the kitchen. Don’t … ’ He trailed off, as though he was thinking again, and drew a deep breath. ‘Someone’s just taken a shot at us, love—from somewhere up on the hillside. What you heard was the bullet hitting the window— okay?’

  For a moment of disbelief the tray was steady as a rock. ‘Yes, Father?’ Then it trembled. ‘Now?’

  ‘Wait!’

  Tom stared at Audley, aware irrelevantly that he could now smell the bonfire against which Faith Audley was closing her windows.

  ‘There’s my good girl!’ said Audley softly. ‘Go back and find your mother. Keep away from the windows. Find her … and say to her “Limejuice”—“Limejuice”—got that?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Repeat it—’ Audley held his voice so unnaturally steady that the steadiness somehow emphasized his urgency ‘—repeat it, love, please.’

  ‘ “Limejuice”.’ Cathy sounded slightly offended. ‘ “Limejuice”, Father.’

  ‘Jolly good!’ The false encouragement sounded equally unnatural. ‘Off you go then, love.’

  But that wouldn’t do for Cathy Audley—Tom wanted to shake his head at the man, but he was staring too fixedly at the archway.

  The edge of the tray stayed in view. ‘But … but … ’

  ‘Off you go!’ Then Audle
y looked at Tom, and understood the limits of obedience belatedly. ‘I’ve got Tom Arkenshaw here to protect me, Cathy love—that’s what he’s here for.’ He grinned hideously at Tom. ‘Isn’t that so, Sir Thomas—?’

  Tom smelt the bonfire again, and thought that he would never smell a bonfire in the future—if there was a future—without smelling his own inadequacy. ‘That’s right, Miss Audley,’ he agreed.

  ‘What’s this?’ Another voice from somewhere behind the child startled him just as the tray, and that part of her which he could see, disappeared. ‘Have you broken something, Cathy—?’

  ‘ “Limejuice”, Mummy—’ The child cut through her mother’s angry question ‘—Father says “Limejuice” !’

  Tom strained his ears to catch the woman’s reaction, but there was only a moment’s silence hemmed in between the wall and the house, against the distant drone of a faraway aircraft. Then there came a clink of teacups on the tray followed by the sound of the back door closing. So … whatever it meant exactly, that codeword, it was a Word of Power—and Audley was blessed with intelligently obedient womenfolk, young and old, when matters came to their crunch.

  ‘As I was saying … I don’t know.’ Audley attended to him again. ‘But. . he missed, anyway.’

  Tom felt the hardness of the flagstone under his hipbone. ‘You also said that he fired from somewhere on the hillside.’

  ‘So I did.’ Audley sounded curiously relaxed now. ‘Because from the bottom of the garden he couldn’t have missed —I also made that assumption.’

  Tom frowned at him, trying to remember the bottom of the garden. There had been a hedge—? He couldn’t remember, damn it!

  ‘It’s a bare hundred yards.’ Audley shook his head. ‘I think the bullet went just over my head, maybe a bit to one side … It’s a long time since I’ve had that disagreeable sensation—or I suppose it could be called “agreeable”, relatively speaking … But then, again, I wouldn’t have imagined that I heard it if it hadn’t missed, would I?’