Other Paths to Glory (8 page)

‘Yes, I gathered that was why.’

‘But you didn’t ask him?’ Butler made this lack of curiosity sound a mortal sin.

‘Well - the whole thing only came up incidentally to what we were talking about –

‘ ‘Which was the Hindenburg Line, I take it,’ said Butler drily, ‘and not the Somme. Go on, Mitchell.’

Mitchell swallowed. Butler had put it bluntly but accurately. And yet somehow unfairly all the same.

‘Professor Emerson was advising me … he was getting me some American maps - their 27th and 30th Divisions were attached to our Fourth Army in 1918 - and we were going to study them together on Wednesday. That’s what we’d arranged to do, anyway. But he asked me if we could put that off because he wanted to go and see a man in Elthingham in connection with this thing he’d found out - ‘

‘The very interesting thing?’

‘Yes.’

It dawned belatedly on Mitchell that he was being interrogated rather than allowed to tell his own story. Where Audley’s tactics over the same ground the night before had been to let him run on, encouraging him to speak his thoughts aloud, Butler evidently favoured continuous harassment.

‘I didn’t ask him about it because I was more concerned with my own work - and because if he’d been ready to tell me he would have done so without my asking. We agreed to meet yesterday morning instead.’

Butler pounced.

‘And he evidently wasn’t ready to tell you about it then either. So maybe it wasn’t very interesting any more?’

‘You can make that assumption if you like, Colonel,’ said Mitchell tartly. ‘I think it would be the wrong one, but you’re welcome to make it.’

‘What would the right one be, then?’

‘Charles Emerson never went off at half-cock. If he said something was interesting - or very interesting - then that’s what it was.’

‘And therefore still is,’ interposed Audley mildly. ‘Well, Jack - are you satisfied?’

Butler gave Mitchell a final lingering look, his lips slightly parted now where they had been pressed together before.

‘Does he know the score?’ he snapped.

‘He knows Emerson was killed.’

‘Does he understand what that means?’

‘If you mean do I know someone wants to kill me too, Colonel Butler,’ cut in Mitchell, ‘I’ve already been given a demonstration, you know.’

‘And that didn’t frighten you?’

‘It scared the hell out of me, frankly.’

The lips parted another quarter of an inch.

‘Well that’s something, I suppose. And you think a khaki uniform will put them
off
next time?’

‘Oh, come on. Jack,’ said Audley. ‘They think he’s dead, or they will when the newspaper announces he’s missing. You knew he was alive - but did you recognise him straight off? Did you?’

Audley was trading on that half minute they had walked across the lay-by, before the Rover’s door had burst open.

‘You think a uniform and a hair-cut and a blond rinse and a bloody stupid little moustache will do the trick?’

‘Why not? Christ, Jack - I think he looks perfect! ‘

Butler took a step back, scanning Mitchell up and down appraisingly.

‘Hmm … If I didn’t know
you
so well, Audley, I might have taken longer spotting him, it’s true. I must admit the moustache looks lifelike …’

‘And you’re trained to look carefully. As far as we know they’ve only seen him close up once, and that was in artificial light at night - even then they had to make sure by asking him who he was.’

‘You brought in Perman to handle his appearance?’

‘Naturally. He said the haircut and the fair hair would alter the shape of his head - take your beret off, Paul - see, Jack? And the moustache broadens his face. Add the uniform and you’ve got a different person altogether - a soldier.’

Butler scowled.

‘That’s the trouble: a soldier is what you haven’t got. That’s what gave him away just now - he doesn’t march, he doesn’t walk - he slouches like a pregnant washerwoman on a wet Monday. My God, man - you may not be an infantryman, but you’re meant to be an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, and that means you can’t drag yourself around on all fours. Stick your chest out. Get your shoulders back and pull in your stomach. A uniform doesn’t make a soldier: it’s the man inside the uniform who is the soldier. At the moment you’re just so much
stuffing.
’

Mitchell drew a deep breath, his cheeks burning.

‘That’s better. Now salute me - go on, salute me. I’m a colonel and you can’t wave at me as though I’m your girlfriend
-
salute me!
’

It had been the first thing Mitchell had done in the privacy of his room at the hotel when Audley had left him alone: he had stood in front of the full length mirror and had saluted himself. Longest way up, shortest way down - he remembered the formula. It had looked gratifyingly military at the time. And it hadn’t looked like anyone he’d ever met.

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Butler. ‘Where did you learn to salute?’

‘I used to play soldiers in the Cambridge University OTC, Colonel Butler,’ he answered with insulting politeness. ‘I’ve also played Raleigh in the college production
of
Journey
’
s End
and Carrington in the Godsey Players’ version of
Carrington VC.
I’m a real veteran.’

Butler gave him a hard look.

‘For your sake I hope you’re half as good as you think you are.’

‘I hope so too.’

‘
Sir.
As of this moment you call me “sir” in public when you’re in uniform. And when you’re in mufti you call me “Jack”. I take it your Christian name is still the same?’

‘I’ve been left that, yes.’

‘Sir
.
’

‘
SIR.
’

‘And whose bright idea was “Lefevre”?’

‘Mine,’ said Audley. ‘It’s his second name and his mother’s maiden name, so he’s not likely to ignore it … But if you’ve finished the drill lesson I suggest we get down to business. I want to hear those reports.’

‘And then?’

‘We have an appointment down there with a Mr Hutchinson.’

Butler looked at Mitchell. ‘The man Emerson visited?’

Mitchell discovered that it was impossible to shrug while holding his shoulders back, the reflex instinct to do so producing only an awkward twitch. ‘He may be, but I’d guess he’s more likely to be the wrong generation.’

‘
Sir.
’

Damn it!

‘Sir.’

Audley shook his head with a sign of irritation.

‘Come on then. We haven’t got all day.’

Butler returned the look of irritation with one of disdain.

‘The reports are in the car.’

‘What do they say - in brief? I’ll read them later.’

Butler looked at him in silence for a moment, as though undecided as to whether to resist the demand. Then he sighed.

‘Ollivier’s officially on leave. There’s a deputy in his chair at the moment, by name Georges Duveau.’

‘SDP?’

Butler flicked a glance at Mitchell.

‘We rather think so, yes. Ollivier’s not in his flat, nor in his cottage in the Dordogne. But his car’s gone.’

‘Have you tried the Somme area?’

‘That’s where the pay-off is. Our men say there’s a security readiness alert in four northern departments - Somme, Aisne, Pas-de-Calais and Nord. The Gendarmerie are thicker on the ground in the countryside than usual, there’s a rumour that there’s a Brigade Mobile squad in Amiens and one of our chaps spotted three old plainclothes friends of his from the Surveillance du Territoire killing time in Arras.’

‘But no Ted Ollivier?’

Butler shook his head.

‘No. But they’re definitely watching the Channel traffic and the Belgian frontier more carefully too. Nothing too obvious, but they’re there right enough. Sir Frederick says you were correct: there’s something big happening, that’s what it adds up to.’

‘But he doesn’t know what?’

‘He doesn’t. And he’d like to know how you produced your early warning too.’

‘You can tell him my thumbs pricked. Has there been any untoward event in those four departments - say in the last week?’

‘Yes. There was a car blown up in Amiens on Tuesday. Officially it was an electrical fault leading to a fire and a petrol explosion, that’s what the local newspaper reported. But the unofficial word is that it was an explosion first, then a fire.’

‘Yes?’

‘That’s all. The police were on the spot very quickly indeed -too quickly, you might say. So no one really knows for certain what happened.’

‘Hmm …’ Audley stared thoughtfully down at the village. ‘And on the home front?’

Butler nodded at Mitchell.

‘Your mother’s cleaning woman, Mrs Johnson, she says an insurance salesman called yesterday while your mother was out. He asked some leading questions about you. I gather she gave him a number of useful answers, including the time of your train from London.’

So that was how he had been pinpointed - all too easily. But it was an incongruous thought that the garrulous and ever-helpful Mrs Johnson had very nearly talked him into the next world.

‘The autopsy confirms the Emerson death cause,’ went on Butler. ‘One sharp blow, that’s all. And there’s nothing on that staircase which could have done it so neatly. It’s straight murder.’

‘A professional job, in fact - the killing? Unlike the fire, eh?’

‘That’s right.’ Butler looked hard at Audley. ‘The fire investigator says the papers were pulled from the files - like a bonfire, he says. Clumsy.’

‘That figures.’ Audley swung round, nodding to Mitchell. ‘Like I said, they’re accustomed to violence, these people, but not to covering things up. But none of this has been made public?’

‘No, it’s screwed down tight for the time being.’

Mitchell examined the two faces with conflicting feelings. Just as they had taken for granted a moment before that the French could suppress the news of some act of terrorism, so they both confidently assumed that they could do the same in England as it suited them. When Audley had done as much the night before he had been so battered and bemused by events that he had not seen further than his own interests, which seemed to be served by the suppression of the truth. But what had happened since -and what was happening now - was on a bigger scale. He knew it had nothing to do with him personally. He knew also what they would say if he asked them:
not in the public
interest,
they would say.

He was mixed up, and mixed up inextricably, in an official secret. And more than mixed up - he was like the worm swallowed by the bird in the Don Marquis poem, his free will and individuality fast dissolving in the secret’s powerful digestive juices: he was becoming part and parcel of the secret itself.

After chivvying them into the car like a nanny with two wayward children, Audley showed no immediate sign of wanting to disembark when they had actually reached Elthingham; instead he sat immovable in the back seat with his nose buried in one of Butler’s reports, leaving them standing beside the vehicle uselessly.

Not that the colonel seemed unduly put out by such cavalier treatment, or was at least no longer surprised by it. He stared round the little square with the air of a property developer, first examining the houses and shops on three of its sides and then homing in on the village war memorial at the entrance to the churchyard on the fourth side.

He examined it in silence for a minute.

‘Typical,’ he observed to Mitchell.

It certainly seemed typical, with its Sword of Sacrifice in bronze superimposed on the tall white cross, its list of names and regiments grouped year by year, first for the 1914-18 War, and then for the 1939-45 second round, and even with the familiar Laurence Binyon lines -

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.

Hackneyed now, those sentiments were, though still moving. But only the first two lines were still true. Perhaps it would have been wiser to have chosen not these lines, which had in fact been written in 1914 when the war was hardly a month old, but the bitter truth which Siegfried Sassoon had foreseen in 1919 -

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll
never forget.

But that couldn’t be what Butler had meant, he decided.

‘Typical in what way?’

‘Numerical ratio,’ answered Butler shortly, pointing to the lists of names. ‘Count them up - the ‘14-‘18 ones are almost exactly three times the ‘39-‘45. It’s surprising how accurate that ratio is across the country.’

Mitchell counted obediently, feeling somehow that his powers of observation were being put to the test. Well, he could maybe deal with that…

‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And the graph of the annual loss is significant too, I’d guess.’

Butler looked at him curiously.

‘What would you deduce from that?’

Mitchell in turn pointed to the names.

‘Three dead in 1914, two in ‘15, eight in
‘
16,
nine in ‘17 and eight in ‘18 … and this is a good prosperous agricultural community - plenty of farms and a few big cities. A stable community, in fact.’

‘You mean yeomen make prime soldiers?’

‘Not exactly - I’m sure they do make good soldiers, but what I mean is that it shows there probably weren’t many men from these parts who chose to wear the red coat before the war.’

‘As regulars?’

‘That’s right.’ Mitchell realised too late that Butler must be a regular soldier, but he was too far committed to his thesis to draw back. ‘The army wasn’t considered a suitable career for a decent man - the non-commissioned part, that is.’

Butler gave him an old-fashioned look.

‘I joined up as an other rank.’ His lips twitched and then drooped at one corner as he observed Mitchell’s discomfort. ‘But you’re quite right - my father gave me hell when I told him I was making a career of it, and that was a long time after 1914. It was “the scum of the earth led by the fool of the family” then, I suppose. At least, that’s what they thought.’