“This is the bloody time!” Mitchell flogged himself awake. “What are you up to, David?”
“My duty. Or … what I conceive to be my duty.” The fatigue showed in Audley too. “They’ve pissed us around something shocking this time—you and me both, and your Elizabeth—Latimer has, anyway, to get him out of trouble! So now we must take our profit from it, if we can.”
“What profit?”
Audley considered the question. “I want you to go to Hadfields tomorrow—or today, as it is now—to see Elizabeth Loftus. And I want you to chat her up—I want you to be very nice to her … I want you to offer to finish off her Vengeful book, as you promised you would do in the first place, Paul—“ A little twitch of pain there: Audley always knew when he was being devious “—you can even take my name in vain, if you have to—but not too much, for safety’s sake—“
“Why?”
“Why me? Because she mustn’t hate me too much!” The pain became pure. “Why you? Because you’re the ideal man for the job—she knows you, and maybe she likes you … and I know you like her. And isn’t it true that in Lieutenant Chipperfield’s day the best press-gangs were always made up of men who’d been press-ganged themselves?”
It was like being swallowed by a boa constrictor: you went in still alive, but in the end the crushing pressures and the stifling digestive juices made you an accepted part of what had swallowed you.
“She’s ideal, Paul.” Audley willed him to accept the compact. “It was in my mind that first time I met her, after what you said. What’s happened since only confirms it—she’s the finest natural recruit I’ve met since I set eyes on you back in ‘74—“ the smile mixed pain with happy memory “—in some ways she’s maybe even better than you, actually.”
The shared memory tore Mitchell back to the British Commonwealth Institute for Military Studies—to the packed shelves of the Great War Documents Room in which he had been researching the West Hampshires’ attack on Fontaine-du-Bois, when he had first locked horns with Audley.
But only for an instant, because he knew at last what they were both about—dear God, he knew!
“She’s perfect,” said Audley, sharing the knowledge with his press-ganged press-gang commander. “Independent means and no ties—unmarried, and not likely to be—no inconvenient boy-friends, no nosey relatives—“
Dear God! Audley must once have had a conversation like this with someone about Paul Mitchell—with Colonel Butler maybe, or old Brigadier Stocker or even Sir Frederick Clinton … but—history was repeating itself now with Elizabeth Loftus for Paul Mitchell—
No!
“You’ll have to go carefully.” Audley took his silence for agreement, and stared into space. “You’ll need professional advice before you pop the question—“
No! Never mind Paul Mitchell—they must have considered Frances Fitzgibbon like this, once upon a time, and he wasn’t having Elizabeth Loftus go the same way—no!
“You look doubtful.” Audley had come down out of space a moment too quickly, to catch his expression.
“Yes—“ Mitchell choked on the admission.
“Yes. It is a responsibility.” Audley nodded understandingly. “But, when you think about it, Paul, recruitment is one of the most important jobs we have—in peacetime.” He nodded again. “In wartime, it’s easy—we get the cream then. But in peacetime …” the nod became a shake of the head “… that’s when we have to keep our eyes open for natural talent.”
A terrible heresy sapped Mitchell’s faith: it could be that Audley was right—she was clever, and more than that—she was intuitively quick … and more than that—more than that—she was resolute—she had killed a man!
“But if you’d rather not do it I won’t force you. It isn’t a job to everyone’s taste.” Audley looked at him, and then brightened. “In fact … I could always ask James Cable as soon as he’s free again— he’s ex-RN, and the Cables are an old naval family. She’s bound to like him.”
Elizabeth would like James Cable—everyone liked James Cable, thought Mitchell miserably. So it wouldn’t make a damn of difference if he refused: Audley had it all worked out; and, what was worse, he probably had it worked out right this time, just as he had once done in the case of a certain Paul Mitchell.
Apart from all of which, it was up to Elizabeth to make up her own mind, for better or for worse—it was her right, just as it had once been his, and he had no right to influence her.
Then, suddenly, his own thought echoed in his head: for better or for worse—
“Well? Will you do it?”
Mitchell heard the rain beat against the windows. He could see his reflection mirrored in their blackness, distorted by the leading of the diamond panes. It reminded him of his first sight of her, in the mirror at the church fete. She had been scowling in his direction, and he had thought to himself that she was even plainer in the flesh than her picture in the file. But that first glimpse had been just as much a distortion of the true image as his own in the windows.
Audley stretched wearily. “You can sleep on it if you like. She’ll keep for a few more days.”
For better or for worse—the idea flowered in Mitchell’s brain, opening like the speeded-up film of a natural growth which normally took far longer to mature. For a second it astonished him, it was so far from anything he had thought himself capable of imagining. But then it surprised him that he had not thought of it before, it was so beautifully simple.
“No—“ He tried not to smile foolishly “no—“
Merely thinking of it gave him all the rights he needed; if he managed it she would be beyond Audley’s reach—and it would serve Audley right for the use he’d made of them both.
“No, I’d like the job, David.”
Audley looked pleased. “You think you can win her over, do you?”
That was the big question: she might turn his offer down in favour of Audley’s. But then, he didn’t need to tell her about Audley’s offer at all: The beauty of the thing was that Audley was giving him the perfect opportunity to plead his own case, free of interruptions.
“I’ll have a damn good try,” he said. “You can depend on that, David.”
It was a double-cross. But, like they said, love and war were about winning, not fair play.
The Old Vengeful Page 29