"Go and tell ‘em to speed it up. Say it's a matter of minutes." The Inspector turned and saw Churchill. "He wouldn't be one of your lads, sir, would he?"
"No, but I can handle the Army side for you if you want."
"I'd be most grateful if you would, sir."
"We're about a mile down the road." Churchill explained where. "When you get his documents off him, have them delivered to the Adjutant. I'll warn the sentry on the gate. We'll see to it that the proper people are informed. Now there's the question of his dispatches. They'll be on his bike."
The two men walked over to the machine, which had suffered no more than minor damage, and Churchill opened the dispatch-bag strapped to the carrier. There was only one packet inside, the one destined for Leonard. It was a fat foolscap envelope stamped Top Secret.
"I'll deliver this," said Churchill, "but I'd better give you my signature for it." He wrote in the proffered notebook. "What happened here?"
"He hit one truck and went under the other. Sounds like his own fault, but you can't tell at this stage."
They were strolling back towards the two lorries.
"Has he got a chance?"
The Inspector shrugged. "He had a wheel over him and must have got dragged a fair way before the driver could pull up. We can't get him out till the crane arrives. The doc's with him now."
Ayscue was among those watching as the man in plain clothes, seen earlier by Churchill, bent forward with a hypodermic syringe. There was a gap in the passing traffic and a faint moan could be heard from under the lorry. The extended hand went limp.
"Coming, James?" said Ayscue.
Without answering Churchill turned back to the Inspector.
"One more point-if you'll just tell me where you can be got hold of I'll see that's passed on to his unit too."
The Inspector gave the information and thanked him.
Ayscue was waiting a few yards off. The two walked back to the jeep in silence.
"It was that dispatch-rider we talked to just now outside the hospital," Ayscue told Naidu.
"Oh. Is he dead?"
"Not yet. But he soon will be, I gathered."
"Poor fellow," said Naidu. "Only a youngster, too."
Standing on the verge, Churchill took out the packet addressed to Leonard and looked at it.
"Imagine dying delivering this. Whatever it is."
Naidu looked at Ayscue for a moment, then said, "He isn't dying delivering it, James. He was on his way to deliver it when something happened as a result of which he will presumably die."
"Something happened. Why? Why did it have to happen?"
Again Naidu hesitated. "If we must go into it now… It's a question without an answer. And there is no question either. It didn't have to happen. It simply happened."
"Come on, let's get going," said Ayscue.
Churchill said loudly, "Yes, let's do that. Why don't we do that? Chaps getting crushed under lorries, it's happening every day. Hardly worth stopping for. A bit uncomfortable for the chap under the lorry, but he was probably going too fast and this little experi-ence'll see to it that he takes more care in future. And think of all those opportunities for spiritual growth on the part of the chap's girl, and his mates, and the chaps who were driving the lorries that knocked him off. All that fortitude and resignation and what-not that they'd have had to do without otherwise. The Lord giveth and by Christ the Lord taketh away. Oh, it isn't only all right really, it's better than all right, eh, Willie?"
"James." Ayscue faced Churchill across the hood of the jeep, "Please don't talk in that accusing tone. I can't think of anybody who'd try to justify this thing here. Surely you must know I wouldn't. Can't you see that Moti and I feel just as badly about it as you do?"
"I don't know where Moti fits in," said Churchill as before, throwing away the cigarette he had been trying to light, "but as regards you, Willie, no, I can't. I don't think you do feel as badly as I do. If you did, you wouldn't be over here, getting ready to drive off to the Mess and have tea, you're supposed to be a bloody parson, you'd have crawled under that bloody lorry and be doing your best to comfort that poor sod, instead of-"
Ayscue had walked round the front of the jeep and now put his face close to Churchill's.
"How?" he said. "Comfort him how?"
"Don't ask me, that's your department, I only-"
"Stop trying to set up a monopoly in feeling. The first thing I could make out over there was that the doctor was preparing to give the man an injection that would make him unconscious in seconds. He gave him it. There was nothing I could do after that, because he'll probably never recover consciousness, and if he does it's unlikely he'd be able to take in what I said or even what I was."
"But he might."
Naidu got out of the passenger's seat and walked past them up the road away from the accident.
"Exactly," said Ayscue to Churchill, "and that above all is why I'm over here instead of over there. What's he going to think if he wakes up and sees me? Use your imagination, James. How would you feel if you came to yourself in a hospital bed with a man in a dog-collar bending over you and telling you to be of good cheer? You'd know where you were due next all right. Agreed?"
Churchill nodded.
"If I had any reason to suppose that that boy believed in God then I wouldn't have come away. But these days the chances are very much against any such thing. And I couldn't ask him. I just couldn't risk it, James. You see that, don't you?"
Churchill nodded again.
"Come on."
"I'm sorry, Willie," said Churchill as they drove away.
"That's all right. We'd better both apologize to Moti. I'm afraid we may have shocked him a little."
"Because of what?"
"Inappropriate behavior."
They picked up Naidu and a few minutes later turned right towards the camp, first pausing to allow a heavy mobile crane to pass in the opposite direction.
Captain Leonard put on his mess-jacket and stood while Deering, his batman, fastened the buttons, using a thin cloth so as not to spoil the polish on the brass.
The jacket was of an unusual deep ultramarine, the mark of an honor awarded to the 17th Dragoons, Leonard's regiment, as a result of an incident in the Peninsular War when a squadron of them had been able to take an enemy force in the rear by swimming, horses and all, across an arm of the Mediterranean. The regiment was colloquially known as the Sailors in consequence. Nowadays it was a reconnaissance unit equipped with scout cars and light tanks, but had remained, as far as its officers were concerned, an abode of the landowning families. It was for this reason that Leonard's masters in Whitehall had chosen it as his cover, explaining rather offensively that nobody would suspect an officer in the Sailors of being anything but what he seemed. In a different mood, those masters had undone a fair part of this precaution by advising Leonard to divulge strong periodic hints about his real job, on the new-found principle-recently advertised to Hunter-that a security system works best when the opposition know it to be at work and may react significantly to that knowledge. Many of the officers and men in the camp had heard that Leonard was not really a soldier at all but some sort of agent of military counter-intelligence assigned to prevent anyone outside from learning what No. 6 Headquarters Administration Battalion was actually up to.
Although he had never trained or served with the Sailors, had never been near them except to be given dinner and shown round once at their depot, Leonard's attention to his turnout as one of them would have been judged adequate even by the Vice-President of their Mess. He pointed out various imperfections-a protruding thread at the edge of the revers, a fleck of dried metal-polish near a buttonhole-which Deering went some way towards repairing. Then, with the care of a cadet about to go on guard-mounting, Leonard examined himself in the full-length triple-paneled tailor's glass he took wherever his masters sent him.
The man inside the jacket and the close-fitting scarlet trousers with ultramarine stripe was forty years old. He had retre
ating black hair that was still thick at the sides and back, and a sallow complexion darkened round the mouth by beard showing under the skin. When he spoke, it was with a perpetual air of urgency stemming in part from the guttural sound he regularly substituted for the letter R. He said urgently now,
"Brush."
Deering walked not very slowly round his officer dabbing at his jacket with a clothes-brush, dislodging a few of the fallen hairs and specks of lint but merely changing the position of most.
"Sticky tape's the thing really."
"You should have thought of that before."
"Yes, sir."
With a forgiving smile, Leonard crossed to the rosewood dressing-table that he had not had to bring with him. Such pieces as this and the imposing mahogany tallboy, tall enough almost to touch the beams overhead, harked back to the days when the Mess had functioned as a farmhouse. The place was large enough to accommodate all the unit's officers above the rank of captain, plus a few deemed to qualify for comfort on special grounds: the Adjutant, Hunter, as administration officer, Leonard himself, who had explained that he needed to be at the center of things. Had he not thought to do so he might have found himself bedding down in an outhouse with a couple of subalterns, or even trying to live in one of the box-shaped, pastel-colored huts that had recently been run up in a nearby meadow and rang with portable radios eighteen hours a day.
He now picked up a red leather spectacle-case, quickly removed the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing, substituted a pair of pince-nez, and closed the case with a loud snap, his eyes steadily on Deering throughout. The effect of the change was to replace the semblance of an ambitious schoolmaster with that of a minor Slavic bureaucrat.
"Well, Deering, any news?"
This was the signal for the daily report on gossip and rumor within the camp. Only a short acquaintance with the Army had been needed to teach Leonard the usefulness of batmen as confidants, eavesdroppers and innocent over-hearers. He had seen exceptional intelligence-value of this sort in Deering as soon as the Mess Sergeant recommended him, and that value had proved itself ever since. There was something about the man that he sympathized with more personally, too. Untidy and casual and sometimes faintly impertinent he might be, but his contempt for the politicians supposedly in charge of national security, combined with his respect for those few who (like Leonard) were really doing something about it, was as proper as it was rare, and would have been totally admirable if expressed in a better accent.
Losing no time in displaying his less attractive side, Deering took half a cigarette from his trouser pocket and lit it. He sniffed twice and said,
"The padre's been on the prowl again."
"Are you sure?"
"See how it strikes you. About two A.M. Coates is parked in the forecourt waiting to take the Colonel's guest home when he sees someone creeping across that bit of meadow towards the huts. Whoever it is goes into one of the ones near the far end-Coates can't be sure which one, but that's where Ayscue's hut is. It was him all right, no doubt about it."
"What do you mean, no doubt about it?" Leonard spoke sharply. A conversation about the work of the unit he had had with Ayscue the previous week had convinced him that no suspicion of spying could be attached here, and the idea of having to reopen a closed file was disagreeable to him. "A couple of the Indians have got huts down that end. It might have been one of them, or Churchill, or almost anybody."
"Churchill and the Indians don't keep dogs. Ayscue does. If it had been anyone else but him, that bloody Alsatian bitch of his would have cracked on like it does whenever you go near it. But there wasn't a peep out of the pooch. I asked Coates particularly. That proves it, see. I remember reading a story about that somewhere, you know, the case of the dog that didn't bark."
The power of reasoning shown here impressed Leonard, but it would not do to let Deering see this. "All right, suppose it was Ayscue, where does that get us? He might have all sorts of reasons for slipping out of camp for a few hours."
"Like what? Going on the piss? He shifts a few here in the Mess when he feels like it, and he keeps a bottle in his hut, too, Evans says. Nothing there. Out on the ram? Can you see our respected spiritual counselor engaging in amatory pursuits? He wouldn't touch a woman with yours. No, he's up to something. Why does he live in one of those bloody pencil-boxes when as a major he's entitled to a room here? So's he can keep a fatherly eye on his flock, I suppose?"
"Well, yes-from what I hear he does spend a lot of time talking to the lads."
"Yes, in a very nasty nosey way, too. Always on at them to let him know if there's anything they're afraid of and whether they're happy. Happy! What business is it of his? And these gramophone recitals and chamber concerts and what-not. It's not natural. Never trust a parson and you won't go far wrong. Say one thing and do another. Politicians who haven't been able to make the grade."
For once, Leonard felt he could do without Deering's support. "Is that all you've got?"
"Not quite. That cupboard of his, the one he keeps locked. Evans says he's done everything he can think of to get a look inside and he's got nowhere at all. How do we know he hasn't got a short-wave radio tucked away in there?"
"Nonsense, there'd be no-"
"It could be something like tit pictures, of course, but he'd only need a drawer for those. It'd pay you to have a dekko at that cupboard, I bet you."
Wearily, but silently, Leonard agreed that he could not afford not to. He had recently been shown a training film about techniques of concealment in which great play had been made with double bluffs, dummy strong-boxes being hidden in the rafters or magnetically attached to the underside of bed-springs while the real one sat in view on the table, and so on. Leonard himself had followed this principle by setting a permanent guard on his office and stowing his most secret documents in a suitcase which he kept under his bed. Its unusually complex lock, however, incorporated a fine wire which any attempts at forcing would rupture, thus triggering off an alarm circuit.
A trained spy might well have camouflaged the hiding-place of his tools after the same reasoning. Could Evans be bribed into doping Ayscue's whisky-bottle as preliminary to getting hold of his keys? Non-minimal risk-potential would be the verdict of the manual- which, however, would be sure to offer helpful alternatives. He must consult it, but not now.
"I think I'll be getting down to the ante-room," he said.
"Funny, that dispatch-rider getting chopped just up the road from here. It was an accident, I suppose?"
"No doubt about it. I was at the inquest. Nothing wrong with him the smash wouldn't account for, or his bike, or the road. Why?"
"That packet he was bringing must have been pretty important, to send a special with it like that, and the regular DR run coming in at eight the next morning."
"It duplicated stuff I've had for nearly a fortnight," said Leonard, lying with his usual ease. "You don't know the Ministry."
"Some of the lads were saying the date of Operation Apollo's been brought forward. I don't know where they got that from."
Leonard felt as if a hot sponge had been pressed against the back of his neck. The information mentioned, together with the many detailed changes of plan necessitated, was what the special packet had contained. "I wish they'd tell me these things now and then," he said, exactly as easily as before. "Funny my chief didn't think to mention it when he had me on the scrambler that night."
"I told them it was all rubbish. Thought you ought to know, though. I could probably get their names if you want."
"Don't bother. You get this sort of thing all the time. Well, I must be off. Gloves."
Deering went to the tallboy and produced a pair of white cotton gloves ironed as thin as wafers. He handed them to his master, who made no attempt to put them on. This was sensible of him, for their evolution resembled that of the sleeves of a hussar's dolman, and no hand bigger than an eight-year-old child's could have entered them. Leonard grasped them lightly in his fist.
; "Hat."
The scarlet-piped ultramarine forage cap was produced with similar formality, but proved to be designed to go on Leonard's long head, and to fit there well enough. He needed it and the gloves for the thirty-yard indoor walk to the ante-room.
"That's all, Deering, thank you."
"Good night, sir. See you in the morning."
Left alone, Leonard felt almost calm again. It had been a bad moment, but no more. Deering brought him rumors at the rate of a dozen a week, and only time had been needed for one of them to hit the mark by chance. Nobody but himself, he was certain, had seen the contents of that packet.
To restore his morale finally, he turned and gazed at a large oil painting which, like the tailor's glass, he had started to take with him everywhere. Partly illuminated by the late sun, it made a handsome and cheering sight. The plate at the top described the subject as Uniforms of His Majesty's 17th Regiment of Horse, the Duke of Staffordshire's Dragoons ("The Sailors"). The picture showed five men on mounts in varying stages of hysteria. The lower plate identified the riders as Trooper: 1810-Lieutenant: 1850-Trumpeter: Field Service Order: 1901-Corporal of Horse: Service Dress: 1915-Major: Full Dress: 1929.
Leonard's attention fixed, as usual, on the last-named. This was a slim, youngish figure, clean-shaven, gazing-unlike the others-directly at the observer with just discernibly blue eyes. His real-life analogue would have seen action in the last year or two of the first war, might well have commanded a brigade or a division in the second, would by now, if tradition held, be fretting at his uselessness in a south-coast resort or spa. In Leonard's fancy, this predecessor of his in the Sailors was saying to him, I did what I could in my way: I enjoin you to do what you can in yours.
There had been a lot of opposition when Leonard, coming across the picture in the Sailors' regimental museum during his sole visit to them, had set about acquiring it for the duration of his Army or pseudo-Army career. His insistence that it was vital to his cover as a serving officer had finally turned the wheels that secured it for him, but it had been a near thing. If the Commandant of the Sailors had behaved more tactfully at his interview with the relevant Minister, had as much as refrained from calling him a grubby little upstart, the issue might well have gone the other way.
The Anti-Death League Page 4