Colonel Butler's Wolf (23 page)

Butler flushed. Its very accuracy made it offensive, like an invasion of the private part of his mind. It was none of Audley’s damn business what he thought. And even if by some rogue intuition he could see so clearly, he had no call to speak of it. It was an act of intellectual ill-breeding.

“ ‘The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish’,” said Audley.

Butler exploded. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, man—spare me the quotations. I’ve had a bellyful these last few hours. Say what you mean and have done with it.”

Audley gave him a shrewd look. “I’m not getting through to you? Or am I getting through a bit too well?”

He paused, then gave Butler a grin that was disarmingly shy. “I apologise, Colonel. Sometimes I say what should be unsaid, I’m afraid. But you must remember I’ve been up on this bit of frontier longer than you. It’s got under my skin.”

He paused, staring northwards at the skyline.

“What I mean is that there must have been times when the Wall was strong and times when it was weak—more like a confidence trick than a real defense. The way they’d have held it then was by good intelligence work. And by keeping their nerve.”

Butler nodded slowly.

“And by a little judicious contempt too, Butler.”

“Contempt?”

“Contempt. Just that.” Audley’s eyes were cold now. “You and I—we’re on our Wall when it’s weak. Weak on the Wall, and weak behind it.” He pointed northwards. “Some of our people don’t believe there are any savages out there. And of course the
intellectuels gauchistes
are quite happy to pick us off from behind—they think it’s high time for the Wall to fall.”

It was hard for a plain man to make sense of what he was driving at, Butler fretted. It was almost as though they were all conspiring to confuse him, Audley as much as any of them.

“But I don’t happen to agree with them. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I find their alternatives altogether cretinous. I suppose that makes me a dedicated counter-revolutionary capitalist … “

Butler grunted non-committally. He could only presume that the blighter was simply restating his oath of allegiance in his own tortuous jargon.

“Which means—“ The eyes glinted suddenly “—we’ve got to teach these fucking Russians a lesson without stirring up any trouble.”

Momentarily the shift from the pedantic to the vulgar took Butler aback.

“And
that
means that we let them go home—scot-free,” Audley concluded.

“Where’s the lesson in that, for God’s sake?”

Audley smiled. “The lesson, my dear Butler, is in the pack of lies we give them to take home.”

He broke off abruptly to squint down the valley towards the main road, where Butler saw a long grey estate car tip slowly off the tarmac past Audley’s car into the gateway of the grass track leading up to the fortress.

“Now, who the hell—?” Then he relaxed. “It’s all right. It’s only Tony Handforth-Jones. He must be getting ready for the new season’s
vicus
dig.” He turned back to Butler. “You don’t need to worry about Handforth-Jones, he’s one of mine. It’s lies that we’ve got to worry about now.”

Butler tore his gaze unwillingly from the estate car. All these outsiders of Audley’s made him uneasy.

“What lies?”

Audley regarded him in silence for a moment. “Let’s look at the truth first, Butler. In reality we’re letting them all go because we’re weak: we can kick ‘em out, but we can’t afford any scandal. We can deal with the Negreiros business, of course. But that doesn’t alter the fact that if it hadn’t been for Zoshchenko cracking up on them, they wouldn’t have needed any Negreiros business to put us off the scent.”

Butler nodded. “Aye. They just had bad luck.”

“It was bad judgement too. They chose the wrong man. What we’ve got to do is to rub that in.”

“How?”

“We’re going to leak it to them we’ve been on to them from the start. With what we’ve got on Adashev, and that fellow they pulled out of New Zealand to train Zoshchenko, we can maybe just about make that stick without giving away our contact in the KGB
apparat
in London.”

“Hmm … You think they’ll swallow that?”

“When they think of me they will, yes.” Audley wagged a blunt finger. “I’ve been wasting my time for months looking for Hobson’s non-existent KGB conspiracy in the universities. But you’re going to tell how Audley’s been watching them all the time and the conspiracy was our bluff to keep them happy. And you can say that I’m bloody livid that they can’t conduct their wretched little operations properly—that if this is the best they can do, they’d better stay home until they know a hawk from a handsaw. Then they can try again. That’s the message:
contempt!
”

The estate car pulled to a halt beside a chequer-board of trenches on the slope below the fortress, and Audley acknowledged Handforth-Jones’s wave.

If the credibility of a lie was related in any way to its size, then this shameless monster falsehood truly might pass, thought Butler. Indeed, it was not so much a lie as the exact inversion of the truth—something only a supremely arrogant man would dare think of. And what gave it the shape and hue of reality was that it fitted not only the facts, but also the man: this was a lie which Audley himself wished to believe.

“Good morning, Tony,” Audley raised his voice and pointed to the three workmen who were unloading equipment from the estate car. “You’re not going to dig in this weather?”

“Good exercise!” Handforth-Jones shouted. “Morning, Colonel! Seen any Picts yet ?”

Butler grunted unintelligibly as the archaeologist strode up to them, rubbing his hands and grinning wickedly.

“Not that there’ll be any Picts abroad today,” Handforth-Jones added cheerfully. “Mornings like this remind me of what Camden thought of this part of the world—‘nothing agreeable in the Air or the Soil’—and Camden never even dared come this far. He said the Eptons were no better than bandits and he wouldn’t set foot on their land.”

“Then what brings you out, Tony?” said Audley, laughing.

“Money, as usual, David.” Handforth-Jones waved suddenly to his brutish followers. “Over here, Alfred! Put the headquarters marker just here and the hospital one over there.”

He swung back to Audley. “It’s Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, and I’m planning for the unfortunate Lusitanians to pick up the bill. You are welcome to watch if you’ve the time. You can even try to look like an archaeologist, if you like. I could do with a bit more local colour.”

“Local colour for whose benefit?”

“Hah! The Lusitanians, that’s who.” Handforth-Jones’s attention was less with them than with his followers, who were engaged in setting up stencilled notices on small wooden pegs outside each group of ruins.

“We’re about to turn the place into a scene of frenzied archaeological activity for an hour or two. I only hope to God the weather holds.” He sniffed the air and scanned the low clouds anxiously. “Which it doesn’t look like doing, naturally.
Over here, Arthur.
Jesus, he’s put the headquarters marker on the latrines. Not that they’ll know the difference, but excuse me—this joke’s getting out of hand already. Over here, Arthur, over here!”

He strode away abruptly, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

Butler looked at his watch. “I ought to be getting back to the Milecastle pretty soon. If you want me to handle that end of it.”

The dirty end, naturally. The end that had sickened him yesterday afternoon and sickened him no less now. But he had known in his heart that it would be his end: it was what the Butlers of the world were here for.

“Audley?”

But Audley wasn’t listening to him: he was staring down the hillside at the retreating figure, his face fixed in an appalled expression of disbelief.

“Oh, dear God,” he exclaimed.
“
Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day!
”

Butler felt the blood drain from his own cheeks, though without knowing why. In anyone else this sudden confusion would be almost comical, but in Audley—in self-confident, omniscient Audley—it was like the moment of awful stillness before an earthquake shock.

Audley faced him.

“Whose idea was it for you to come up here?”

“Up here?” Butler repeated the words stupidly.

“To shoot your supper.”

“To shoot—?” Butler frowned. “It was Gracey’s. The Vice-Chancellor.”

Audley blinked. “His idea?”

“There are hares up here, so he said.”

“He said so?”

“Aye.” Butler grappled with his memory. “He said he had it on good authority.”

Audley relaxed. “On good authority. I’ll bet it was on good authority!” He turned to look down the hillside.
“
TONY!
”

Handforth-Jones paused in the act of climbing aboard a small yellow dumper truck. Audley signalled furiously to him to rejoin them.

“What the devil’s up?”

“Up?” Audley groaned. “Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, that’s what’s up. I haven’t been as clever as they thought I’d be, that’s what’s up.”

Handforth-Jones advanced over the hillside towards them again.

“Hullo there! What’s the matter, David?”

“Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, Tony: what is it?”

“That’s just our name for this little fund-raising venture.” Handforth-Jones chuckled. “The First Lusitanians were stationed here during the Severan reconstruction. Hadrian’s Own First Cohort of Loyal Lusitanians. They rebuilt the headquarters. There’s a very fine dedication slab to them in Newcastle Museum, Collingwood Bruce found it here—it was reused as a paving stone in the Theodosian reconstruction—“

“For God’s sake, Tony—are you getting money from the Portuguese?”

“Well, yes. That’s what I’m trying to explain. There’s a whole batch of them over here on some junket or other. The Reader in Portuguese History is a Fellow of King’s, he laid this on for me.”

“Portuguese?” Butler frowned in bewilderment.

“Lusitanian, same thing. Lusitania was Roman Portugal,” Handforth-Jones explained. “Portugal’s supposed to be ‘Our Oldest Ally’. It occurred to us they might like to see the one and only place where Portuguese troops served in Britain, which is Ortolanacum. Might make them feel generous, you know.”

“And they’re coming here?” Audley cut in.

“That’s right.” Handforth-Jones nodded. “Some time in the next hour or so. Not all of them, of course. Just the top man.” He grinned again. “Which is a good thing, because I’m standing him lunch in Newcastle after he’s seen the inscription on the slab in the museum just to prove I’m not making it all up. Not that he’ll make much of COH I AEL LUS, but no matter.”

Audley looked quickly and hopelessly at Butler.

“Was this common knowledge, this visit, Dr Handforth-Jones?” Butler asked.

Handforth-Jones stared from one to the other suspiciously. “Well, I haven’t tried to hide it. We’ve talked about it at dinner quite often.”

Common knowledge. So the visit of the Beast of Cazombo to Ortolanacum had been bandied around both King’s and Cumbria—and by the cruelest mischance had not come to the ears of the one man who mattered.

“Damnation!” Audley studied the rock-strewn slopes of the crags above them on each side of the Boghole Gap.

Might as well look for a flea on a sheepdog’s back, thought Butler bleakly. If Alek was up there already, it would take supernatural luck to spot him now.

“Damnation,” Audley muttered again, reaching the same conclusion a second later.

He turned to Handforth-Jones. “Tony, we’re going to pull the curtain down on Anglo-Lusitanian friendship for the time being. I’m sorry.”

“Do I get to know why?” There was a mixture of resignation and curiosity in the archaeologist’s voice. “Or is this another bit of your top secret cloak and dagger?”

“I’m afraid more dagger than cloak this time, Tony. There may be a sniper up in the rocks waiting for your chief guest. And if there is, then we should be due for a student demo from Castleshields at just about the time he arrives.”

Handforth-Jones looked hard at Audley for a moment without speaking, presumably to satisfy himself that a silly question had not elicited a silly answer. But Audley’s face was set too firm for that.

Butler hefted the shotgun in his grip.

“High Crags is the likeliest,” he grunted. “He’ll have a clearer shot from the right, and the ground’s that bit more broken. I’ll take that one.”

“No.” Audley shook his head. “There’s too much ground to cover. The only way to stop Alek now is to stop those young idiots from meeting Negreiros. Which means stopping Negreiros from getting here.”

“He’ll be on the road by now,” said Handforth-Jones.

“Which way will he be coming?”

Handforth-Jones shrugged. “It all depends whether he comes up the M1 or the”M6. I don’t know where he’s coming from. More likely the M1, I suppose, then turning off through Durham and Corbridge.”

Audley nodded. “That’d mean he’ll come from the east. I’ll take my car down the road and try and head him off. Butler, you take the west—the Carlisle side. And just don’t let him get in range of these crags.”

“No.”

Audley frowned at him.

“I was meant to be here, was I?” Butler spoke harshly. “Meant to be in the way of the demo?”

“Out of the house but in the way. You weren’t meant to miss the fun, I’d guess, Jack. I reckon we were all meant to be here. They planned it this way.”

“Aye, that’s what I thought.” It vexed him strangely to think that Dr Gracey’s hospitality and culinary pride should have been twisted by the enemy to that end. He nodded towards the archaeologist. “Dr Handforth-Jones can try the Carlisle road. I’ll see what I can do to stop the demonstration getting here.”

“To stop it? How?”

Butler addressed Handforth-Jones. “They’ll take the path through Boghole Gap, won’t they?”

“They’re sure to, yes. It’s a hell of a way round by the road.”

“Do you think you can stop them?” Audley asked in surprise.

“If they use the Gap, I can have a damn good try,” said Butler, still eyeing Handforth-Jones. “That is, if I can have those three men of yours.”