Colonel Butler's Wolf (26 page)

The sound of the shot, when it came, seemed so unnaturally loud that he thought for a moment it was a noise inside his head. It was the slackening of the press around him rather than the report itself echoing from the cliffs which corrected the misinformation in his brain.

The hands on him loosened, and instinctively he slipped his own holds, shaking himself free backwards and upwards. He felt Richardson’s hand under his elbow steadying him, lifting him. As the gap between defenders and demonstrators opened up he could see a confusion of bodies squirming on the causeway, scrabbling for footholds.

But they weren’t looking at him.

“Well—I’ll be buggered!” exclaimed Richardson.

Butler turned, his eye running up the line of the Wall on High Crags.

The one thing about amateurs, the one thing you could rely on, was that they would ignore the plainest and simplest orders.

Dan McLachlan had plainly and simply ignored his, anyway: the Russian Alek—the deadly man with the gun— walked five yards ahead of him along the beaten path on the top of the Wall, his hands held stiffly above his head. The stiffness, even at this distance, suggested to Butler that Alek was extremely nervous, which was reasonable enough with a shotgun in the hands of an amateur pointed at the base of his spine; a shotgun held one-handed, too—over his left shoulder McLachlan carried the spoils of war, a delicate-looking long-barrelled sniper’s rifle.

Butler understood the reason for Alek’s nervousness. Apart from the public humiliation of it, that casually-held shotgun was enough to frighten anyone. And that shot, a
feu de joie
rather than a warning, must have given him a nasty jolt. He walked as if he realised only too well that he was lucky to be alive.

Even as they watched him McLachlan raised the captured rifle in the air triumphantly, very much as he had waved the croquet mallet the evening before.

“The cheeky devil!” murmured Richardson. “You know, David’s never going to believe this. Never.”

Butler grunted non-committally.

“You think not?” Richardson’s tone indicated that he found Butler’s reaction ungracious. “Well, I tell you one thing for sure: he’s damn well saved our bacon. We don’t have to mix it with Mike Klobucki’s non-violent friends any more. They can demonstrate until they’re blue in the face now, thank God.”

Butler was slightly surprised at the feeling in Richardson’s voice. Then he noticed, with an ignoble sense of satisfaction, that Richardson had the beginnings of a fine black eye.

“True. They can go or stay as they please now,” he replied curtly.

“And Alek?”

“You take him back to Castleshields. Then drive him to Carlisle or Newcastle and turn him loose.”

“Turn him loose!” Richardson’s dented nonchalance cracked.

“Aye. He hasn’t done anything.”

That was the irony of it all: nobody had done anything. Apart from a few punches on the causeway, which the demonstrators would soon forget in the interest of their own self-respect, the slate was clean.

Because of that, this operation would never go down as a famous victory, a close-run thing. Only a handful of people would know that the realm had been successfully defended without fuss, which was the mark of the most desirable conclusion.

Only one job remained now, to finish what Neil Haig Smith had started.

NOW THAT IT
was no longer required, the drizzle perversely thickened into steady, slanting rain. With it the visibility quickly closed in around them, blotting out first the more distant ridges to the north and south, and then the crags on each side.

Butler stood silent, watching the bedraggled procession fading into the mist beyond the causeway. Their heads were down and their shoulders hunched against the downpour. Only Alek walked with any suggestion of spirit.

But then the sun shone for Alek, a sun of survival that no English weather could dim. How much he had known, or how much he had hoped, Butler couldn’t tell. But knowing the way the KGB worked he guessed Alek had known little beyond the inescapable truth that he was the expendable man in this operation; the man with the dangerous and thankless task, the one-time tiger who had been demoted, like Butler, to the role of staked goat.

Butler had recalled that same feeling of bitter impotence so vividly—he had been prey to it himself less than twenty-four hours before—that it had softened the rough edges from the few words he had spoken to the man. It had not exactly warmed him to say those words—that would have betrayed a most dangerous and wrong-headed sentimentality. But it felt like an assertion of humanity as well as strength to grant freedom to an enemy.

So now Alek knew one more thing: that against all the likely odds he had once more survived. Until the next time, anyway.

McLachlan coughed diplomatically behind him.

“If we don’t go and collect Polly soon we’re all going to get soaked to the skin.” A lock of damp hair fell across the boy’s face in agreement with his statement. “I think the rain up here’s wetter than the stuff down south, you know.”

Butler nodded. “All right. Let’s go then.”

McLachlan picked up the shotgun and fell into step beside him.

“That chap with the rifle—that was a bit of luck, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I mean … I just stumbled on him. He was fiddling with his gun—it wasn’t loaded. I think he was putting it together.”

“You were lucky then, weren’t you!”

“What I mean is, I didn’t forget what you told me, sir,” McLachlan went on stiffly. “But I didn’t have any choice.”

“Aye, I can believe that,” said Butler.

McLachlan started to say something, then stopped in deference to Butler’s taciturn mood, shaking his head to himself at the unfairness of it nonetheless.

They climbed in silence for a while along the track beside the Wall. The rain-mist thickened around them as they ascended, while the Wall itself rose and fell beside them, sometimes only waist-high and sometimes head-high, cutting off the edge of the cliff beyond it. And as they went higher the rocky outcrops on the open southern side began to build up too, enclosing them on the narrow path as between two walls, one natural and the other man-made.

“This will do,” Butler muttered. He stopped and turned to McLachlan, who had fallen half-a-dozen paces behind him. “I’ve got some instructions for you.”

“Instructions?”

“Orders would be more accurate.”

McLachlan grinned at him uncertainly. “More orders? We’ve not finished, do you mean? I hope to God they aren’t too complicated.”

“They’re not complicated.” Butler stared directly into the wary eyes. “And this really is the finish, boy. The game’s over.”

“What game?”

“Our game—and your game. All you have to do is to go back from here and pack your things up. Don’t bother to see Epton—we’d rather you simply left him a note saying you’ve had to return to Oxford to see Sir Geoffrey Hobson—“

“See the Master? What about?”

“You aren’t going to see him. You will write him a letter. You’ll tell him you’re resigning your scholarship and you’re leaving Oxford.”

“Leaving—?” McLachlan tossed the damp hair across his forehead. “Are you crazy?”

“We want it in writing, but you can keep it short. Tell him the family business makes it necessary for you to return to Rhodesia.”

“Rhodesia! I’m damned if I—“

Butler overrode the angry words. “Of course we don’t expect you to go there. There’s a ship in the Pool of London that will suit you better—the Baltika. You have my word that no one will stop you going aboard.”

McLachlan stared at him incredulously.

A good one, thought Butler with dispassionate approval. And a good one would quite naturally play to the last ball of the last over. It made it all the easier to obey Audley’s parting words: we don’t want any trouble, so don’t make it too difficult for him. Just make the lie stick.

“It’s over, lad—all kaput,” he began gruffly. “It never did stand a chance, even before Zoshchenko cracked up.”

McLachlan continued to stare at him for one long, bitter moment. Then slowly, almost as if the hands were disobeying the brain, the muzzle of the shotgun came up until it was in line with Butler’s stomach.

Only it wasn’t McLachlan any more.

It was subjective, of course; Butler knew that even as he recalled the Master’s words, ‘He’s more mature than the usual run of undergraduates’.

And yet not wholly subjective, because the acceptance of failure was putting back those concealed years into the face, just as it must have done with Zoshchenko as his hold on Neil Smith’s identity weakened at the last. Now he was watching the same struggle for that inner adjustment: he was watching the false McLachlan wither and die.

What was left was older and harder—this had been the vital half of the pair, after all. But it was still a pathetically young face, even over the shotgun’s mouth.

“Don’t be foolish now,” said Butler gently. “Not when we’re giving you the easy way out.”

McLachlan licked a runnel of rain from his lip. “The— easy way?”

“Aye. I meant what I said: we’re letting you go home. You’ve been damn lucky, lad. If Zoshchenko hadn’t gone sour on you, we might have let you go and hang yourself. I think we would have done, too.”

The damp strands of straw hair fell forward across the face again. Viking hair, thought Butler. But then he had read somewhere that the Vikings had also sailed eastwards, down the Russian rivers, leaving their ruthless seed there as well as in the West.

The young man licked his lips again.

“I could have sworn you didn’t know. At the bridge, I mean—“ McLachlan bit off the end of the sentence as though ashamed of it.

Butler shook his head slowly. A touch of truth now, to gild the big untruth.

“I didn’t know, not then. You weren’t my business.” Let the boy wonder which of his friends hadn’t been his friend. “I didn’t know until yesterday afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon?”

“McLachlan was partially left-handed, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but—“

“Oh, you were good. You must have put in a great deal of practice. I didn’t notice anything wrong, anyway.”

“I don’t understand. If you didn’t notice anything wrong, what did you notice?”

“You made me think, lad, you made me think! You see, your left-handedness—or McLachlan’s—is the rarer variety. There are plenty who bat right-handed and bowl left—Denis Compton does, and so does Derek Underwood for Kent. But not many do it the other way round. The last time I saw it was years ago, a chap named Robbie Smeaton in the Lancashire League, a spin-bowler.”

“No, you were damn good.” He smiled patronisingly into the young man’s frowning face. “A little clumsy at times, maybe. But you even held the croquet mallet like a lefthander when you swung it between your knees.”

He gestured casually at the shotgun. “Do we really need that now, lad?”

The muzzle didn’t move. “Go on, Colonel.”

Butler shrugged. It had been bad luck, that rare variety of left-handedness. But then the false McLachlan had dropped every game where it showed—cricket and golf and hockey— and concentrated on rugby, where it didn’t show.

Every game except croquet. And in that he had schooled himself to play as the real McLachlan would have played.

“You made me think about you. You see, we had a file put together quickly on you, but it didn’t mention that. It wasn’t important, I suppose they thought—if they even thought about it.”

The rain rolled down McLachlan’s white face. There was a strained, blank look about it now which made Butler uneasy. For the first time he found himself measuring the distance between them. It was no more than four paces, but there rose a sharp little outcrop of rock in the middle of it, like the tip of an iceberg thrusting through the turf. He hadn’t noticed it before because it hadn’t mattered. Only now it seemed to matter.

He shook the rain from his face, stamping his feet and edging to the left of the rock.

The shotgun jerked peremptorily. “Just stand where you are, Colonel … And stop talking in riddles.”

“Riddles?”

“You didn’t see anything. But you saw something. What did you see ?”

“You could be on your way home now. This isn’t getting you anywhere.”

Again the gun lifted. “What did you see?”

The boy was frightened: for some reason he was scared rigid. That pinched look was unmistakable.

“What did you see?”

And the fear was catching. To be at the end of a gun held by a frightened boy wasn’t what he had expected.

“I saw the reason why your man set fire to Eden Hall,” Butler growled. “I never could understand why he did it— Smith’s records weren’t important any more—we knew who he was, and he was dead. So killing me didn’t make sense.”

“But when I saw you playing croquet out there on the lawn, it was then I realised that your files would have been in that attic too—that if I’d known about you then, I’d have looked at them too. Then I really saw you and Smith together for the first time, as a pair, and that was all I needed, really.” He paused. “Just what was there in those records?”

McLachlan looked at him blankly for a moment. Then his lips twisted.

“We never did know. It was the only piece of his life we never properly covered, because the man we sent down originally, back in ‘68, couldn’t find any of those old records. But when Smith was killed we reckoned someone might go down, someone of yours. We couldn’t risk you seeing what we hadn’t seen.”

“What made you think we’d check on Smith?”

“He said he was going to give himself up. Just himself, not me. He hadn’t the guts to be a traitor. But we weren’t sure how far he’d gone with it.” McLachlan checked himself suddenly. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

Butler shrugged again, elaborately. “It never did matter. We were on to you from the start. I tell you, boy, you’ve been lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Aye. Luckier than most. You’re young—it isn’t the end of your career. You’ve had a valuable experience, you might say. And it wasn’t your fault you failed. They won’t hold it against you.”

McLachlan looked at him narrowly, a little of his old self-possession reasserting itself.