Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

  That had been Audley’s final comment—and it didn’t seem to worry him very much either. But it made Butler shiver as he remembered Sir Geoffrey’s contemptuous dismissal of the student files controversy : rather was there a near-criminal lack of guards at the gates of these ivory towers. Small wonder they had enemies within!

  And yet—damn and blast it—these were British ivory towers, Butler told himself angrily. Freedom from the interference of bureaucratic snoopers ought to be part of a Briton’s birthright: it was only the lesser breeds who were hounded by their ever-suspicious masters.

  Butler cocked his head as the thought developed inside it: that might even be near the heart of this part of the problem … it might very well be the heart itself.

  A good mind, a steady mind—Hobson would not be wrong about that. And a good, steady mind which had been exposed to three years of Oxford.

  “Would you say he was a young man of independent mind?”

  “Sm— Zoshchenko?”

  “Perhaps we’d do better to call him Smith.” He was forgetting Audley’s exhortation already. “Was he a man of independent mind?”

  “Independent … “ The Master examined the word. “No, hardly that. He was too young to be truly independent, whatever he may have thought.”

  “Isn’t that what you teach them to be here?”

  “Teach them?” Sir Geoffrey almost chuckled. “We don’t teach them. They have to reach their destination under their own steam—we merely point them in the general direction of truth.”

  It was difficult to tell whether he was joking. But then, as he stared at Butler, the meaning of the questions came home to him, and the sparse eyebrows raised in surprise.

  Butler nodded.

  “God bless my soul!” muttered Sir Geoffrey. “You mean to imply that we succeeded with him ?”

  It wouldn’t have been a sudden blinding flash on the road to Damascus, thought Butler. With that good, steady mind it might have been no more than a small nagging doubt at first —a small thing compared with the pleasure of pulling the wool over the eyes of all these clever old men. But what he would not have known was that the clever men were working on him too: that the tiny doubt was a poison working and spreading inside him, working and growing as he was admitted to their ranks until—

  Until what?

  Never mind that for the time being. Whatever it was, it had been just that bit too much for him; he had become one of them, the man with his own Cause—or at least the Cause of Holy Russia, buried deep inside him, and the division of loyalties had split his Slav temperament right down the middle … Wasn’t it Hamlet that the Russians so enjoyed, with its dark vein of self-destruction?

  Butler himself had no time for Hamlet, who seemed to him to have been in a fair way of doing damn all in cold blood until his uncle’s stupid treachery had given him the hot-blooded excuse for action.

  But that was how the thing might have happened, with some final dirty instruction pushing poor Zoshchenko-Smith to resolve his dilemma with a drunken motor-cycle ride through the night—a sort of motorised Russian roulette.

  Certainly, everything he had found out so far, from Pett’s Pond to King’s chapel, bore out that theory.

  “And that would mean that in effect he committed suicide ?” said Sir Geoffrey, staring at him.

  “I seem to remember that you suggested as much in your letter. Does it surprise you now?”

  Sir Geoffrey gestured peevishly. “So I did, so I did! But in retrospect I felt that it was not wholly in character. It was— how can I put it—an inexact way of approaching the problem. Not like Smith, at all.”

  “But perhaps like Zoshchenko, Master. You must remember that we’re dealing with two men now, not one. And neither of them was quite himself.” Butler paused. “Besides, if it was like that it wasn’t truly suicide—at least not when he set out. It was more like daring fate to settle things for him— maybe he had his own people on his tail by then and he knew he was on his way to betraying everything he’d worked for.”

  “His own people? You mean the KGB or something like that?”

  Butler shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Could they have been responsible, Butler?”

  “Honestly, Master—I think not. There’s no evidence of it as yet. But to be sure of it I’d need to talk to someone much closer to him than you’ve been. Do you know of anyone who fills that bill ? He had friends, you say?”

  “Hmm … “ Sir Geoffrey frowned heavily into space. “I do indeed, Butler—I do indeed.”

  He raised his eyes to Butler’s, still frowning, and then fell silent again.

  Butler thought: the old devil started this business and now he doesn’t like the way the wind’s blowing—the more so because it’s blowing down his neck.

  “I know this must be distasteful to you, sir,” he said aloud, desperately trying to stop obsequiousness from seeping into his voice. “But we have to know, one way or another—“

  “I don’t need you to tell me my duty, Colonel Butler. Or to threaten me with your one way or another. It’s simply that the person who fills your bill exactly happens to be the daughter of a very old friend of mine. It seems—though I wasn’t aware of it until after the man’s death—that there was an engagement in the air.”

  “With Smith?”

  “So it seems.” The words came out with reluctance. “Is it possible that you can … speak to her without revealing the man’s true identity?”

  “I’d prefer to do it that way.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.” Sir Geoffrey relaxed. “I wouldn’t like to see Polly Epton hurt again—and not like that.”

  Epton.

  They hadn’t suspected Smith and they didn’t know much about him—Audley had admitted as much, and that was nothing less than the truth, by God !

  “Epton?” Butler repeated casually. “Would that be the Castleshields Eptons?”

  “That’s right. Charles Epton’s daughter. She’s an occupational therapist here—I suppose that’s how she met Smith. And then she must have met him again up north.”

  That changed things, thought Butler. They had been convinced that something had tipped Smith over the edge, but it had never occurred to anyone that the thing might be a woman.

  He hadn’t bargained on a woman.

  Damned women!

  He was jerked back to reality by Sir Geoffrey’s voice, its tone edged with bitter complaint.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said ‘what a waste’, Colonel Butler.”

  “Of Miss Epton, Master?”

  “No, man—of Smith. He had a good mind. What a waste!”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Damned women.

  IX

  HE RECOGNISED THE symptoms only too well.

  To start with he had had trouble making up his mind, and then, when he had belatedly come to a decision, he had consciously made the wrong choice.

  Although his usually healthy appetite had suddenly deserted him (and that was another symptom too) he knew very well that in the field it was always best to eat when the opportunity presented itself. So reason decreed that he ought to stoke up with the hot sausages the pub was serving, or some of the serviceable veal and ham pie, or even the bread and cheese and pickled onions.

  Yet here he sat, staring sourly into his second whiskey and soda, knowing that it wasn’t doing him the least good.

  It wasn’t that he was a misogynist, he told himself for the thousandth time. It was patently irrational to hate them all because of the gross betrayal and infidelity of one.

  It was simply that he knew he didn’t understand them. Or rather, he knew that understanding women was a skill given to some and not others, like the ability to judge the flight of a cricket ball instinctively. Or maybe it was like tone deafness and colour blindness.

  But whatever it was, he hadn’t got it. And without it he feared and distrusted himself, and was ashamed.

  He looked again at his watch
. Sir Geoffrey had seemed confident that he could arrange a rendezvous for this place and time, and his duty to interview her was inescapable: if the rumour of that unofficial engagement were true she ought to know more about Smith’s state of mind than anyone else, though he was hardly the best man to extract her information.

  He snorted with self-contempt and reached out for his glass.

  “Colonel Butler.”

  Whatever Polly Epton was, she was certainly no slip of a girl; she was a well-built, well-rounded young woman—the American term “well stacked” popped up in Butler’s mind. Indeed, although not conventionally pretty she glowed with such health and wholesomeness that the Americanism was instantly driven out by women’s magazine images of milkmaids, butter churns and thick cream.

  It was ridiculous, but he felt himself praying enviously I hope my girls grow up like this.

  “Colonel Butler?” she repeated breathlessly, and this time a shade doubtfully, as though a certain identification had let her down.

  “Hah—hmm ! That’s right!” he replied more loudly than he had intended, rising awkwardly, his knees tilting the low table in front of him. “Miss Epton, is it? I beg your pardon— I’m forgetting my manners.”

  “Thank heavens—I thought for a moment I’d made a mistake—please don’t get up, Colonel Butler.”

  But they won’t grow up like this, he thought sadly.

  “Let me get you a drink, Miss Epton. And something to eat too.”

  “That’s kind of you but golly—nothing to eat here. I’m much too much of a fattypuff to dare to eat stodge at lunch-time. But if I could maybe have a half of bitter—I shouldn’t have that really—but just a half.”

  From the bar he watched her fumbling with the buttons of her shiny raincoat as she sat down, shaking her thick mop of light brown hair. She was truly a little too plump for the mini-skirt she was wearing, even allowing for the fact that it was a fashion he’d never quite learnt to accept. But then he’d never quite learnt to accept any such fashionable extremes, and at least it was more becoming on her than the Bulgarian peasant outfits he had observed in London. Indeed, on her the mini looked surprisingly innocent, no denying that.

  And no denying that it was nevertheless a long way from any sort of mourning. Yet he fancied that even this apparent cheerfulness was less than her natural high spirits; there was a restraint to it, a shadow almost.

  “Uncle Geoff said on the phone that I couldn’t mistake you—thanks awfully—but I thought I had, you know. You didn’t look as though you were expecting me.”

  “I was—ah—thinking about something else I’m afraid, day-dreaming,” he began lamely, unable to bring himself to ask her to reveal what had been so unmistakable about him. The red hair, no doubt, and the prizefighter’s face!

  She sipped her beer, watching him over the rim of the glass, and then set it down carefully on the table between them. “Uncle Geoff said you wanted to talk to me about Neil,” she said with childlike directness. “Is that right?”

  “That’s quite right.”

  “He said that I must answer all your questions, but I mustn’t ask any of mine—is that right too?”

  “More or less—yes, Miss Epton.”

  “It sounds a bit one-sided to me.” She looked at him with frank curiosity. “He made me promise I wouldn’t split on him—or on you. And he made you sound rather like the Lone Ranger.”

  “The Lone Ranger?”

  “Your mask is on The Side of Good.”

  “My mask?”

  “Well, he said if anyone asked about you I’m to say you’re an old friend of the family. I didn’t quite twig whose family. Mine I suppose—Neil didn’t have much in the way of relatives, apart from a dotty aunt in New Zealand.”

  He looked at her, trying to see through the veil of flippancy. Apolitical, Sir Geoffrey had said—not intellectual, but not stupid either. A nice, ordinary girl, even a little old-fashioned by modern standards—it would be a mercy if that were true!

  “I think we’d best leave it vague, Miss Epton. Say just a friend, never mind whose.”

  “But are you a friend?” She paused. “Except that’s a question, isn’t it. It is asking rather a lot, you know—answers but no questions.”

  It was asking rather a lot, he could see that. And there was nothing so corrosive of discretion as unsatisfied curiosity— that applied to men and women equally. But how much to tell, and how much to leave untold?

  “Suppose you wait and hear the questions. Then you can decide whether or not you can answer them.” He tried to speak gently, but as always it came out merely gruffly. It would have to be the usual mixture of truth and lies, after all. “But I tell you this, Miss Epton: I think Neil would have counted me a friend—and I promise you he would have answered if he’d been here now.”

  “If he’d been here now … “ She echoed him miserably, the shadow across her face suddenly pronounced. “If only he could be here! I still can’t quite believe that he’s never going to be here again, that he’s never going to come in through the door—“ She looked past him into nowhere, her flippancy altogether gone. “Did you ever meet him?”

  Butler shook his head sympathetically. This way might be the wrong one, but it might get some of the answers without questions.

  “He was a super person, more fun to be with than anyone. And everyone liked him because there was no pretence about him—“ She looked at him again.

  Butler felt his face turn to stone. This child would have married the fellow—it was true.

  And where would it have ended then? In the maximum security wing? Or in a dacha outside Moscow? And for sure across the pages of the News of the World and with hurt and bitterness. He longed suddenly to be able to tell her that of all the inevitable unhappy endings this was the happiest she could have hoped for.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel—I’m not usually emotional like this.” She looked at him sadly, misinterpreting his expression. “I can see that you are a friend after all now.”

  “Polly!”

  A huge, mop-headed fair-haired young man in a patched and shabby sports jacket loomed at his shoulder.

  “Come on, Polly—have a beer and to hell with the calories!” exclaimed the young man cheerfully.

  “Hullo, Dan,” she replied with equal cheerfulness that was ruined by a single mascara-stained tear which rolled down her cheek. “Colonel Butler—meet the white hope of the black Rhodesians, Dan McLachlan.”

  “Joke over,” the young man groaned. “Glad to meet you, sir—so, long as you don’t believe anything Polly says.” He glanced down at Butler’s glass. “I don’t rise to short drinks, but if you’d like a beer—?”

  “Stingy,” said Polly brightly. “I’ll have that beer, Dan. But you must excuse me while I put my face back on. I’ll only be a second.”

  The fair-haired man watched her disappear into the Ladies before turning back to Butler.

  “I wondered when it was going to hit her.”

  Butler looked up at him. “It?”

  “Poor old Boozy—Neil Smith running out of road.” McLachlan shook his head. “She’s been bottling it up.”

  Butler grunted neutrally.

  “She should have got it off her chest.” McLachlan nodded wisely. “Stiff upper lip doesn’t become girls, anyway—did you know old Boozy?”

  “Hah—hmm!” Butler cleared his throat. “Friend of yours?”

  “Boozy? Hell, Boozy was a great guy, even if he was a bit of a lefty. He wasn’t my year, actually—haven’t seen him since he was made a baas in Michaelmas Term. But I was at prep school with him years ago.”

  At school.

  “Indeed?” Butler swallowed. “Where would that have been?”

  “Little place down in Kent.”

  “Eden Hall?”

  “That’s it—do you know it?”

  Grunt. “And you were a friend of his there?”

  “That would be stretching it a bit. Boozy was always a year ahead of me—I was
a domkoppe in the Fifth Form when he was a prefect in the Sixth. I didn’t even recognise him when we met again at Dick’s a couple of years ago. Not until he told me who he was—then I knew him of course. Only one Boozy—more’s the pity!”

  Of course—only one Boozy! And what a gift to be remembered by young McLachlan of the Fifth.

  McLachlan looked at him seriously. “But if you’re a friend of Polly’s, sir, it’ud be a good thing if you could keep an eye on her—at least until the day after tomorrow. She’s taken this thing harder than she’s let on, and she drives like a maniac at the best of times.”

  “What happens the day after tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I can handle it after that. We’re both going up to her old man’s place in the north. And she’ll be OK once she gets home.”

  Steady the East Lanes, Butler told himself. “You mean you’re both going to Castleshields House?”

  “Surely. Do you know that too ?”

  “I rather think I’m supposed to be talking to you there, young man. If you’re interested in Byzantine military organisation, that is.”

  “Well—“ McLachlan grinned disarmingly “—I’m a PPE man myself, with the emphasis on the middle P. But say, have you come down to collect Polly? Is that it?”

  “Not exactly,” replied Butler cautiously. “But tell me, Mr McLachlan—“

  “Dan—“

  “Hmm—Dan, then—what exactly takes you to Castleshields House? I thought it was attached to the University of Cumbria.”

  “So it is, sir. But Dick’s is by way of being a shareholder in it. Young Hob and the high-powered Dr Gracey cooked it up between them, didn’t you know?”

  Butler made a great play of consuming the last of his whiskey. This was where Audley’s cover plan began to look decidedly thin, when his institutional knowledge was shown to be deficient in such small matters as this. “Dick’s” was evidently the King’s College, and “Young Hob” was Sir Geoffrey, as distinguished from his long-dead grandfather and predecessor in the Master’s chair at the college. But the relationship of the college with Castleshields House was still beyond him.