War Game (10 page)

“No.” Mitchell eyed him curiously. “Why d’you ask?”

“Because I want to know. Not Falkland?”

“No.” Mitchell stared at the memorial. “It could have been at that, I suppose… . But actually it was William Waller, the Parliamentary general. He was writing to old Sir Ralph Hopton before they fought each other at Landsdown—they’d been comrades years before in the German wars—“

“I remember.” Audley nodded. Surprisingly he did remember, too: Hopton had written first, hoping to win over his old friend, or at least to win time. And Waller had rejected his overture, but in the’ noblest terms—

With what a hatred I detest this war without an enemy …

He felt his confidence begin to flow again, diffusing inside him like the warmth of a hot drink on a freezing day. Mitchell was a very thorough young man, as he had proved again this minute. But that was a virtue to be used, not to be feared.

“Right. I shall now see Superintendent Weston and the sergeant.” He didn’t want either of them with him down there beside the Swine Brook: each would put him off his stroke, though in very different ways. But in any case they would be better employed elsewhere. “By myself.”

They looked at him questioningly, and that was good.

“When does the—the Double R Society fight its next battle?”

“Easingbridge, the day after tomorrow —Saturday,” said Mitchell promptly. “They’re putting on a performance at the annual fete and flower show. Do you want us to be there?”

“Can you get a horse in time?”

Mitchell shrugged. “If you pushed me —I guess so.”

“I’m pushing.” Audley turned to Frances. “And you must be there too.”

“No problem.” She nodded readily. “All I need is a costume.”

“Good… . Now, in the meantime, Frances, I want you to research the Roundhead—ah—“

“Wing.” Mitchell supplied the word.

“The Roundhead Wing. And particularly how Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe fits into it. But don’t be too obvious with the questions.” He swung back to Mitchell. “And you, Paul—“

“Let me guess. Would a ton of gold be close?”

“Close enough. What d’you know about it?”

“Only what’s been in the papers. The Brigadier told me to lay off it until you gave the word, just to check out Swine Brook Field.” The corner of Mitchell’s mouth lifted. “But I can add two and two as well as the next man.”

“And what do you get?”

“Giving Charlie Ratcliffe a fortune is like handing a stick of gelignite to a juvenile delinquent: he’s going to want to play with it one way or another, and either way something’s going to get damaged.”

“A whole box of gelignite, more like,” said Frances.

So they’d done their homework, and something more. But with two like this that was to be expected.

“You want me to go down to Standingham?” asked Mitchell. Audley shook his head. Sending someone as keen as Mitchell to Standingham was just asking for something violent to happen, and that would never do.

“Not yet. It’s research for you, my lad. I want to know all there is to know about that gold of Ratcliffe’s—chemical analysis, and so on. And I want to know more about the history, too. The experts all said there wasn’t any gold; I want to know why he thought differently.”

Mitchell perked up at that. “You think somebody sparked him off?”

“At the moment I don’t think anything, except my feet ache.” Audley turned towards Frances, steadying his eyes on her face with a conscious effort. He must think of her as someone’s daughter. “I want you to concentrate on the Double R Society, Frances, remember. It’s only information I want, nothing else.”

He watched them climb the gate and disappear down the track between the hedgerows.

He had laid that last bit on rather too thick, the bit about information. There wasn’t anything she could get other than that, and the frown she had given him back said as much. He must try to sound more like his usual belligerent self next time.

He began to descend the hillside.

At one time or another he had walked across quite a few battlefields, he reflected, and many of them had featured ridges not unlike this one: Vimy and Waterloo, Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and Senlac Ridge at Hastings, Hameau Ridge on the Somme where he had first got to know the real Paul Mitchell… . One of his ancestors had even died on a ridge at Salamanca, riding at General Le Marchant’s side.

Of course this ridge was small beer compared with those, but it now shared with them the lack of any distinguishing mark which singled it out as a place where men had once buckled down to the serious business of killing each other. Just as the more recent marks of the Double R Society’s mock-battle had faded, so there were no residual emanations of King Charles I and his Parliament, the Lord’s Anointed and the Lord’s Elected Representatives.

Or, presumably, of what had also been staged here on behalf of Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe.

He could see Superintendent Weston waiting for him.

If Cox had said Weston was a sharp fellow then he was a sharp fellow; because Cox himself, for all that he looked like a retired PT instructor, had a mind like a cut-throat razor.

So it would be better to make a friend of Weston than to try and bullshit him with the letter of introduction he carried in his pocket.

“Superintendent Weston?”

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor … retired PT instructor … none of those, certainly. Say, a middle-aged country doctor with the authority of half a lifetime of births and deaths behind him.

“Dr. Audley.” The Superintendent advanced towards him, but the sergeant stayed back like an obedient gun-dog waiting for his signal.

Confidence tempered by caution.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Superintendent.”

“That’s all right, sir. It’s quite nice to have an excuse to get away from my desk for an hour or two.”

Caution plus neutrality. But no overt hostility, and in Weston’s place Audley knew that he would be hopping mad behind an identical façade.

“Your Chief Constable will have told you why I’m here.” Audley paused significantly. “It’s on the instructions of the Home Secretary.”

Weston nodded slowly. “In connection with the Ratcliffe investigation.” He matched Audley’s pause, second for second. “And you want my sergeant.”

And that, of course, was adding injury to insult: bad enough for some anonymous Home Office official to descend on a hardworking police force empowered to ask questions without the obligation of answering any in the midst of a stalled murder case, implying dissatisfaction, in high places; but to detach a useful officer from the duty rota when the force was already overstretched—all forces were over-stretched—that had to be beyond the bloody limit.

Yet Weston still appeared cool enough and that was no good at all for the sort of answers that were needed. Somehow he had to be made to drop his defences. But pulling rank wouldn’t achieve that any more than a straight appeal for help, which would only be despised.

He realised suddenly that he was staring fixedly at Weston, and that Weston was returning the stare with interest. In another moment they would be in a staring match.

“I gather he was your man on the spot.” He shifted the stare to the sergeant. “In fact, very much on the spot.”

He took in the younger man in detail for the first time. Younger was right; over the years he had grown accustomed to the truth of the cliché that police constables grew younger and younger as one advanced into senility. But now the sergeants were growing younger too: if Weston passed as a middle-aged country doctor, Sergeant Digby could have been a first-year medical student, no longer wholly innocent but as yet unmarked by his profession.

Another baby to make him feel old and jealous.

And another
clever
baby, if what the Brigadier had said was to be believed.

“You’ll have read his statement, then. And the others.” Weston’s voice cut through his line of thought.

“His statement?” Audley frowned stupidly. Maybe they weren’t babies after all—a month of humid Washington and a few hours’ flying, and he couldn’t keep his mind on the job for five consecutive minutes. Maybe they weren’t babies at all —maybe he must just be getting too old.

Weston heaved a carefully-controlled breath. “Transcripts of all the statements taken in the course of the investigation so far have been sent to the Home Secretary.” He paused, watching Audley impassively. “I assume you’ve studied them, sir.”

Statements.

Of course there had been statements. Dozens of statements, hundreds of statements. Names and occupations and places and times and facts. Statements to be checked and cross-checked and double-checked. Statements to be read and re-read and sieved and strained and refined.

That was what a murder investigation was: not a brilliant
tour de force
by a Sherlock Holmes, but an organised routine carried out by dozens of men and women working sixteen hours a day.

Of course there would be statements. In fact, with the Ratcliffe investigation the way it was that was all there would be at this moment. Just statements.

And nine times out of ten the police could be pretty sure, that somewhere in that mass of paper was the name they wanted, and that if it was there they would get to it in the end. Not by luck—the whole system was built to eliminate luck as far as possible, because luck had to be arbitrarily good or bad in equal proportions—but by the cold mathematics of routine multiplied by team work multiplied by sixteen hours a day.

Only this had to be the tenth time; the time when there was no name and all the multiplication was ruined by a final zero factor. And if Superintendent Weston was half as good a policeman as Cox believed him to be, then he would know it. The trick was to make him admit it. …

Why not the truth
? thought Audley suddenly.

He smiled at Weston. “No. I haven’t read any statements.”

“No … sir?” Weston’s impassivity was a work of high art.

“Not one single word.” The truth was supposed to set men free, perhaps it might set them both free now. “Just two newspaper reports.”

Weston continued to stare at him expressionlessly, reserving his right to burst into laughter or tears.

“Four hours ago …” Audley consulted his watch casually “… actually rather less than four hours ago … I’d never even heard of either the Ratcliffe family or Swine Brook Field. As a matter of fact I was on a jet from New York four hours ago—minding my own business.”

At last the hint of an emotion showed on Weston’s face: one corner of his mouth twitched.

“But now you have to mind ours for us?”

“It does rather look that way.” Audley nodded slowly, then converted the nod into a negative shake. “But I wouldn’t have read the statements anyway.”

“No?” The twitch became the beginning of—it might be a snarl or it might be a smile.

“No.” The implications of that he had to let Weston work out for himself: it had to be either an insult or a vote of confidence, according to whether Cox’s assessment was wrong or right.

A smile.

“Quite right too. Take you a week to read—and then you’d only be where we are.”

Cox had been right.

“Which is nowhere?”

“Which is nowhere.” The smile completed its journey and then vanished. “And you work for the Home Office, Dr. Audley—is that right?”

Polite disbelief.
Am I right
? meaning
I am wrong, aren
’
t I
? Cox had understated the reality.

“Does that matter, Superintendent?”

“Not to me, sir. To my sergeant it might, I’m thinking.”

Audley flicked a glance at the sergeant, to find that he too was being carefully scrutinised. He wondered whether the sergeant was thinking he’s old for this job, just as he’d been thinking a few moments before how very young the sergeant was. But then the sergeant could hardly know what the job was, of course.

And that was one aspect of the truth which must be ducked. “I’ll try not to keep him too long.”

“No skin off my nose. He isn’t really one of mine, not yet.”

“Not … one of yours?”

“He’s been attached to me for this case.

Audley frowned. “You mean he’s not CID?”

“He has been. And he will be again before I’m very much older. But at this moment he’s uniform branch.”

They were up to the second of the two things he needed from the Superintendent before he had asked the first vital question. But Weston had already half answered that with his suspicion that Audley wasn’t just a Home Office busybody: clearly he’d already smelt a rat in the Ratcliffe case.

“Tell me about him, Superintendent.”

“Sergeant Digby?” Weston’s face hardened. “He’s a good copper. With the makings of a very good one.”

“He looks very young … to be a sergeant.”

“You think so?” Weston managed to look amused without softening his expression. “This time next year he’ll be an inspector.”

Well, well! thought Audley. But then—why not? The police fought an unending war against crime, and in war the company commanders were often no older than Sergeant Digby. No doubt there’d been plenty of fresh-faced young captains-of-horse in Cromwell’s panzers, the New Model Army.

“Indeed?” And, come to that, it didn’t take much imagination to turn Paul Mitchell into a hard-faced young colonel, not yet out of his twenties. Ruthlessness had never been the prerogative of old age, after all.

“Scholarship boy, Henry Digby was— Fenton Grammar School, before it went comprehensive.” Pride and regret were evenly distributed in Weston’s voice. “And they went for flyers then, too. Eleven ‘O’ levels he had, and three ‘A’ levels—good ones, too. Could have gone to university for the asking, and his mother wanted him to. A teacher, that’s what she had in mind for him.”

“But he wanted to be a policeman?” Familiar pattern, even if the ambition was eccentric: all those examination honours were no good if mother couldn’t pass her psychology test. Likely she’d have stood a better chance of making a teacher of him if she’d insisted on helmet and handcuffs.

Weston nodded. “Three commendations in his first two years. One year as a detective constable, and I marked him for accelerated promotion myself… . We sent him to Bramshill.”