For the Good of the State (6 page)

Tom blinked the rain out of his eyes. ‘I should be so lucky!’ In front of Jaggard all he could do was touch her wet shoulder. ‘Take the car—I’ll call you soon as possible. Maybe this evening, maybe not. Okay?’ The thought of
this evening
without her was loss and desolation. ‘Goodbye, my love—’

‘Goodbye, my love—’ She echoed him ‘—take good care, Tom.’

He slipped and slid back, down past Jaggard and through the open gateway. There was a car far down the lane, already facing outwards, on to the main road. But, of course, they always turned round for a quick getaway, like adulterers parked in secluded driveways. That was the rule.

So it all depended on
Harvey
now—

Before the high hedge cut him off he turned back towards her: she was standing just as he had left her, on the edge of old Ranulf’s rampart, like a statue.

Take good care, Tom
, he thought.

THE JOURNEY’S
last hour, after he had divested himself of Harvey at a convenient railway station, was curiously disquieting, even a little frightening.

If there was one thing Tom prided himself on, it was the ability to concentrate his mind on what was important, to the exclusion of all minor matters, however gratifying and pleasurable. But now, when … after all Henry Jaggard had said (and not said), and with what Garrod Harvey had added … when that concentration should have been on
Panin, Nikolai Andrievich
and
Audley, David Longsdon
, and the web of circumstances which hypothetically bound them together … but now—
now—
he was faced with a damned, bloody mutiny of his thoughts against the direct and legitimate orders of his mind.

It wasn’t even as if they were merely wandering away into the countryside on either side of them, alerted by sign-posts which pointed towards early Norman castles known to him, or even to places adjacent to such castles—
Aldingboume, Arundel, Bramber, Cadburn
…
Ashley, Barley Pound, Basing, Bishops’ Waltham, Castle Redvers—
the counties’ roll-call came to him automatically and geographically as he drove westwards, as it did all the time, wherever he was, whatever he was doing elsewhere—
Alton Charley, Eccleshall, Litchfield
…
Ascot Doilly, Ascot Earl, Bampton, Banbury—
it would have been the same in Staffordshire or Oxfordshire; and he had walked them all anyway, or nearly; and even if an odd name had registered it would still only have been in passing and a minor matter; because (as he had already thought about old Ranulf’s almost forgotten
motte
only this morning) what had outlasted eight or nine centuries’ decay would still be there waiting for him another day, another time.

But Willy wouldn ‘t—

He shook his head at another approaching sign-post—
Branding 4—
he didn’t want to go to Branding—

Or Willy might not be, anyway—

Then he caught sight of the place-names on the other arm of the sign-post:
Upper Horley
5 …
Steeple Horley 6½!

And, by God,
Steeple Horley
was
Audley, David Longsdon—
and he’d hardly even thought of Audley since he’d deposited the wretched Harvey on that damp station forecourt, protesting only half-heartedly that this wasn’t what
Mr Jaggard
had intended. But at that moment it had been exactly what
Sir Thomas
Arkenshaw
had intended, Tom had thought with obstinate satisfaction at the time. Because he wasn’t going to turn up at Steeple Horley, to beard Audley in his den, with a driver who quite obviously wasn’t a driver (in both conversation and driving-ability) because the man drove like a spavined cart-horse but talked too casually about old treacheries, and dropped old names with them, as though he knew it all, had seen and met them all.

But that was where it had all gone wrong nevertheless, as he’d parked on the forecourt, with Garrod Harvey still talking—

There had been a girl—a very pretty girl, with a tip-tilted nose and breasts to match, such as he loved, and all the confidence of all three—there had been this girl about to cross the station forecourt entrance—
God damn! he had stopped the car automatically, just to look at her
…
but, when he had looked at her, he had thought of Willy instead
!

Only six-and-a-half miles—and he was still thinking of
Willy
. And, what was worse—what was much, much worse—he wasn’t thinking about the next time, if there was a next time: he was cursing Jaggard—Jaggard, and Ganod Harvey, and Audley, and bloody Panin—and wondering what Willy would do now, with the rest of her weekend—now
this evening
, now
tonight
and now
tomorrow —

But this was foolishness—mere schoolboy foolishness—thinking about … not Audley, not Panin … but what Willy
might
be doing; tonight—

But she had said
‘Goodbye, my love—take good care!’

The road curved more sharply than he had expected, and there was a great high downland ridge swinging away from him as he twisted the wheel, then swinging back into view, stark against the confused sky, which didn’t know whether it was winter or spring.

How much emphasis had she put on that? Had it been no more than a casual goodbye—a warning not to drive too fast? And why should that matter to her, anyway? Or to him?

Even the bloody sun had come out now, suddenly hot through the windscreen, making him blink—when it had finally pissed down out of dark clouds over Ranulf’s bloody little ditches, and she had stood there watching him leave her in the lurch, and—

Oh
shit!
thought Tom.
He had forgotten to pay the bloody hotel bill!

And there was another sign-post:
Upper Horley
that way, and
Steeple Horley—

He had left her in the lurch, and soaking wet, and with the bill. And there was that naval attaché, clean-cut and crew cut, and a good Anglo-Saxon Protestant out of Annapolis and Polaris—or Trident— whose father was a distinguished professor of something at Harvard, or Yale—

Of Scythian Archaeology, maybe—?

Tom gritted his teeth and jammed his foot on the brake simultaneously as he realized he was over-shooting the sign he’d been looking for, which was half-hidden in an overgrown tangle of hedge.

The car bucked and skidded slightly under him, on the loose gravel of a road which was only half-a-car’s width wider than a track. But mercifully there was nothing behind him to slam into his backside, only a distant cyclist he’d overtaken half-a-mile earlier. But … it had said
The Old House
, hadn’t it—?

It was very quiet, as much in the middle of a sudden sun-lit nowhere as he had been so happily this morning with Willy, under those rain-clouds. “
Rain at first, followed by bright periods spreading from the West”
, the weather man had said on the radio this morning. But the truth was that ‘bright periods’ were all in the mind, not the sky.

He engaged reverse gear savagely, scattering the gravel again for an instant before remembering the lone cylist and jamming on the brakes again in panic, gripping the wheel convulsively as he squinted into the mirror.

But there was no cyclist in view now—

Tom frowned into the mirror, first relieved, then angry with himself for his carelessness, and then mystified, in quick succession. Where had the cyclist gone—?

He lowered the driver’s window and poked his head out of the car. The high curve of the downland was still there, sharp against an outrageously blue sky—the last rearguard of this morning’s clouds were far to the east now. But … if this was
Steeple
Horley, there was bugger-all to it—not a roof in sight, let alone a steeple.

Then he saw the cyclist, watching from a gap in the hedgerow on the other side of the road, fifteen yards back, peering from behind a blackthorn tangle and a large pair of spectacles.

‘Is this—’ As Tom took a second breath to pitch his voice louder he couldn’t honestly blame the cyclist for taking cover from such a lunatic driver ‘—is this Steeple Horley?’ Manners! ‘Could you tell me, please?’

The head vanished instantly, but the rear wheel of the bicycle came into view just below where it had been, as though the cyclist—it had been a boy in an American baseball cap—was readying himself for instant flight.

‘Steeple Horley, is this?’ Tom addressed the rear wheel.

The head appeared again, hesitantly and partially, and then nodded. ‘Yes.’

About ten years old, estimated Tom. And, as small boys must not talk to strange men, needing encouragement. ‘Where’s the steeple?’

The boy drew breath. ‘Sixteen-thirty—it fell down then.’

And ‘sixteen-thirty’ would be in the reign of King Charles the First, not at 4.30 yesterday afternoon: the spectacles somehow suggested precocious erudition to Tom, and encouraged him towards precision. ‘I’m looking for “The Old House”—where Dr David Audley lives—?’

The boy stared at him for a moment. ‘Why?’

That wasn’t at all what Tom had expected. But a straight question required a straight answer. ‘I have an appointment with him. He’s expecting me.’

‘Oh!’ The boy rose up on one tip-toe to apply his other foot to its pedal. ‘In that case …
follow me!
’ Then he vanished again.

Tom backed the car obediently, until he reached the hedgerow gap again, and saw that he had been right the first time: the overgrown legend or the sign did indeed indicate that
The Old House
lay somewhere down the equally overgrown lane down which the boy had invited him. But of the boy himself, and the bicycle, there was no sign.

Twenty yards down the lane there was a gap in the great tangle of thorn and blackberry bushes on his left, revealing a tiny brick cottage surrounded by apple-trees and an immaculately-tilled vegetable garden. But there was no boy and no bicycle waiting for him at its picket-gate. And there wasn’t any garage, or even a break in the brief ramshackle fence, and the lane continued beyond the gap; so did Audley have a son, then—and a wife—in this
Old House
of his? Harvey hadn’t said—Harvey must simply have taken it for granted that he knew, or that it was of no importance; or maybe Harvey had left him to stew in his own juice, on being dismissed; but he hadn’t thought to ask, anyway.

He accelerated cautiously. If the boy was Audley’s … allowing that he might be a spindly-twelve, home from some expensive local prep school … that would predi-cate a much younger wife, or an elderly mother—?

He was in the midst of an annoyingly ill-founded and inadequately-based hypothesis when the hedge fell away abruptly, and he saw what was undoubtedly
The Old House
, on his right—old stone and buttressed—an ancient roof, with an early-sixteenth-century pitch: as a house it hardly made sense in its lack of coherent architectural purpose, with what looked like a barn abutting it—a buttressed barn also, without windows, but with a fine arched doorway wide enough for a loaded wagon, and built of fine ashlar much too good for any barn in a countryside where worked-stone would have been at a premium, with no quarries handy, or rivers up which such stone could easily be brought.

He had to swing the wheel hard again as the lane ended while he was making nonsense of what he saw, to bring the car round into a wide square of gravel, in the L-shape of the eccentric house and the impossible barn: stone like that was like gold-dust—or gold-blocks—like the high-cost outer skin of castles designed to resist rams at close quarters, or petraries and mangonels and trebuchets at a distance, in siege warfare; or to impress the neighbours when English life became more settled and civilized … but not for a bloody
barn—
not stone as beautiful as that, for God’s sake!

But there was a ditch, right in the middle of an expanse of rough-cut fieldgrass—

Tom got out of the car, frowning. It didn’t look like a serious defensive ditch, for there was no sign of berm or rampart. But maybe there’d been a palisade—it could have been a pathetically-defended manor house, or even an Anglo-Saxon site … compared with Norman works, domestic Anglo-Saxon work was a joke, mostly. And it was undoubtedly a very old ditch—

‘Can I help you?’

The question caught Tom between the shoulder-blades, at his greatest disadvantage, back in another time.

‘Yes—’ He swivelled in the gravel ‘—I’m sorry—’

‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw?’

‘Yes.’ Tall, thin, blonde—slightly faded blonde—fortyish, and well short of pretty, but not uninteresting, Tom registered in quick succession: typical well-bred English stock, perhaps a shade over-bred.

‘Yes.’ She agreed with him coolly. ‘My husband’s office phoned.’

‘Yes?’ There was something not quite right about that vague, haughty stare of hers. Tom was used to people staling at him unbelievingly—as the young policeman had done at first this morning, before the penny dropped; never mind his unEnglish face, few people knew what a baronetcy was, and expected an elderly knight, dubbed for long years of distinguished civil service or exuding commercial power and prestige. But although this woman wasn’t the type to make that mistake—and wasn’t
quite
staring unbelievingly, anyway—there was still something wrong. ‘Yes—’ He smiled hesitantly. ‘—I’m not late, am I?’

‘No.’ She ignored the smile. ‘But you do have some form of … ’ she extended a long thin-fingered hand on the end of a matchstick arm ‘ … of identification—?’

‘Oh—yes!’ The extraordinary thing was that she was somehow rather sexy with it—matchstick arms, vague expression and ash-blonde hair so pale that no one would know when she went off-white, thought Tom professionally; only the recent memory of Willy, as bouncy as a squash ball and as wholesome as her own proverbial blueberry pie, relegated the woman to the second division.

‘Thank you.’ She fumbled his identification, like the Tsarina accepting something rather nasty from a flea-ridden
moujik
, which she had to take but would have preferred not to look at before she passed it to someone else. ‘Why were you sorry?’