The Labyrinth Makers (21 page)

'You lived round here then?'

'Born and bred here. Father farmed what was left during the war. I was only little, but I remember them–Hampdens, Beauforts, Bostons and Dakotas. Bostons were my favourites.'

Audley climbed awkwardly out of the cabin and walked a few paces across the tarmac. A slight breeze had risen–or perhaps there was always a breath of wind across this open land; it stirred the young spring grass, rippling over it in waves. He could smell sheep, and everywhere the runway was marked with their droppings. There was a pervasive loneliness about the place. Not the loneliness of the open downland, which had never been truly disturbed. Men had been very busy here once amid the roar of engines, with all the purposefulness of war. Where the downlands were eerie, this was only sad, as though time had not yet been able to wash away the human emotions which had been expended here.

The airfield was not quite dead yet, not quite one with all the other debris of old wars.

He got back into the Land-Rover.

'Queer old place, isn't it!' said Warren. 'I've sat here of an evening, and I could almost hear the planes. And I've waited for one of 'em to come up from nowhere on the runway down there, like they used to do!'

Audley exchanged a quick glance with Faith. Her face had a curiously frozen look, as though talking of the past could conjure it up again.

'That would be down there, towards the old castle?'

'That's right.'

'Can we go down that way?'

Warren nodded, and started the engine. 'Nothing easier!'

'Do you mind if we get off the runway, though. There should be a taxiing lane to the left somewhere. I'd like to see what that's like.'

Warren slowed down and turned on to a narrower roadway which curved away from the junction of the runways. As far as Audley could see, the airfield stretched ahead of him, dead level. He twisted himself in his seat to look backwards; the control tower had gone and he would have to use the water tower as his point of reference.

'If you want to see the old castle, you're going to be disappointed,' shouted Warren. ' 'Tisn't a castle at all. It's just a few hillocks on the ground–a Roman camp it was. Not a proper one, either. The archaelogists said it was what they call a practice camp probably. You wouldn't know what it was just to look at it.'

Audley listened with one ear, both eyes on the receding water tower. The Nissen huts dwindled as the taxiing lane unrolled smoothly behind them.

Then slowly the tower began to sink from view. He looked round at the featureless meadow. Sure enough there was a gradual, almost imperceptible slope to it now, a gentle undulation. The Hump!

Steerforth's safe deposit hut must now be somewhere to the left, what was left of it. To the right was the line of the runway, and there'd be no buildings on that side. He looked backwards: the water tower had disappeared completely. On either side the empty airfield stretched, with not a thing in sight.

'Slow down a bit,' he commanded Warren. 'I seem to remember there were one or two odd huts down here, weren't there?'

'Nothing much down here. The old shooting range's over to the left, ahead, near the Roman camp. There was a hut hereabouts, and another down the bottom there for the flare path gear, I think.'

'Where was the hut here?'

Warren braked and coasted to a stop. 'Just over there. There's a bit of concrete still in the grass–it's a damn nuisance every time we're haymaking. I've never got round to grubbing it up — some of those concrete bases are a foot thick and more.'

Audley could just distinguish a break in the waving grass. So there it was: the last known resting place of the golden treasures of Troy. A few square yards of wartime concrete, annoying an English sheep-farmer! And that was where the real search had to begin tomorrow. It would be easy enough to find the spot again, anyway.

'Hey! Come to think of it, there's an old map of my father's which has the old buildings and the runways marked on it–at least, I seem to remember them marked on it,' said Warren with a flash of inspiration. 'I'm sure it's in the attic somewhere with his papers. I could look it out for you if you're interested.'

'That would be very civil of you–it would be a great help,' replied Audley. Actually, wherever the boxes were, they were certainly not going to turn up on the site of any demolished airfield structure. But an accurate map of the area was essential: it had been the one thing which had not been included in the Steerforth file among either the old or the newer papers, understandably, since the airfield itself had been of no significance.

Warren let in the clutch. 'Right, then! We'll be getting back, if you don't mind. I won't be able to find your map straight away–wife's uncle'll be here any moment. I'm making silage for him this year–but when he's gone I'll get up into the attic and have a look round. Are you staying round here?'

'We're at the Bull.'

'Phew! Then you'd better have your cheque book at the ready. Won't let you bend down to pick up your handkerchief at the Bull now, but they don't forget to charge you for it afterwards! Food's good, too–if you can afford it. But it's only the taxpayer's money you're spending, isn't it?'

Warren's combination of self-confidence and casual familiarity grated on Audley's nerves. But the man's grin took the sting out of the jibe. He was being perfectly natural, treating them as he probably treated everybody, and it was impossible to be stuffy with such open good humour. And not just impossible–ridiculous too.

Audley suddenly felt tired and very sorry for himself. Somewhere along the way over the last few years he seemed to have lost both his sense of proportion and his sense of humour. Their arrival at the Bull had been a case in point: Faith had seen the joke and he hadn't. And now this.

Then there had been Fred's original warning about the sheltered existence which had divorced him from reality: it had been a delusion of intellectual grandeur which had got him into this business.

Except that Fred wasn't reality either. Nor was Panin. Warren and Faith and Mrs Clark were reality.

Or perhaps he was simply in the eye of the hurricane, in a moment of sanity surrounded by trouble. Tomorrow, certainly, he would have to face up to the fact that he didn't really know where to begin to look for the treasure, or even why he was looking for it. But in the meantime he could enjoy himself.

The atmosphere of sanity created by Keith Warren saw Audley a long way. It saw him back to the heated comfort of the Bull –Faith even remembered to borrow two suitcases from a sympathetic Mrs Warren. What explanation she gave he never knew, but he suspected it was more for his sake than her own that she added this touch of respectability.

It saw him through dinner, which was not quite as good as Warren had forecast, but good enough to cancel- out the sly looks presumably reserved for newly-married guests.

But it didn't quite see him to bed.

Audley sat in his shirtsleeves watching Faith strip down to an absurdly inadequate matching set of multi-coloured underclothes, reflecting that schoolmistresses had never been like that in the old days. Or maybe they had. But she was not so much shameless as quite without shame, and his mingled lust and embarrassment was outweighed by a tenderness which confused him. He had never felt like this about Liz, who had been so much more spectacular.

He shook his head. 'What am I going to do with you?' he said, half to himself.

'I should have thought that was obvious.'

'I don't mean now, you over-sexed wench! What are we going to do with each other when this is over … This isn't what I do normally.'

'I should hope not!'

'Be serious, Faith–just for a moment. You know what I mean. What you call a game–I shall go on playing it if they'll let me. I think it's important and I'm not going to give it up. But you hate it, don't you?'

She frowned, and then came over and knelt in front of him, taking his hands in hers.

'Dear David, you're not a very masterful lover, are you? You want to be approved of as well as loved, and the two don't necessarily go together these days, you know!'

'Then I'm old-fashioned. And that's because I'm too old for you. So it wouldn't work, would it!'

'It's up to us to make it work. And that's a lot of balls about your being too old. I'm not a schoolgirl exactly, you know. It's no good telling me I'm too young–and I'm the one who decides whether you're too old. And I think you're just pretending to be old: it's a bad habit of yours I'm going to have to break when we're married.'

She was so matter-of-fact that he almost didn't believe what he'd heard.

'I know you haven't even asked me yet–I know! But if you're really so old-fashioned you'll have to get round to it sooner or later. It's called "making an honest woman of me". And I shall accept because I can't possibly have you glowering around the way you did when we arrived here!'

Audley groped for the right thing to say. He had known her for three days and he had never known anyone like her. He had argued with her and lost his temper with her. He had used her as a pawn in his game and he had used her body as much to comfort his fears as to alleviate hers. He could not begin to explain to himself why she had somehow become dear to him; she was not in the least his type of girl. Yet the thought of losing her now was not to be borne.

Yet she was Steerforth's daughter.

Slowly she withdrew her hands from his.

'Me and my big mouth!' she said lightly. 'It's all a joke really, David–forget it. Don't let it spoil the fun we can have tonight, anyway.'

She began to fumble with the hooks behind her back.

'Here! Do you really think it's fair to describe me as "flat-chested" — those hulking step-brothers of mine used to, you know!'

Audley reached forward and grabbed her arms clumsily, pulling them forward and sliding his hands down to imprison hers. But somehow he became entangled in a strap, and only succeeded in helping her prove that she would never be a rival to Raquel Welch.

'For God's sake, Faith!' he said thickly.

It wasn't the idea he shied away from, but the sheer indignity of the situation. A man simply didn't propose clad only in his shirtsleeves to a half-naked girl in an overheated hotel room in the middle of an incomprehensible job. Not a man like himself, at least, who liked to calculate the odds and hated to be wrong-footed.

Not a man like himself!

What a pompous, stupid bastard I've become, thought Audley in a flash of clarity which completed the earlier moment in the Land-Rover. Dignity and reputation were like the Emperor's Clothes–a mere self confidence trick. If he surrendered to this delightful beanpole of a girl he would never be able to wear them again, but in any case they would never again fit him comfortably if he let her escape. He needed her much more than she needed him.

'My dearest Faith–if you and Mrs Clark both agree, who am I to question your decision? Will you make an honest man of
me
?

She nodded, wide-eyed. 'David—'

'The job still goes with the man, remember.'

'The job still goes with the man.'

He raised her hands to his lips. It was a marvellous thing for once to have no reservations about a decisive decision.

'And the man, my dear, is going forthwith to his Hilton-standard bed. We've got a lot to do tomorrow.'

He started to raise his hand to forestall what he guessed she was going to say, only to find that his thumb was still entangled by the strap of the ridiculous rainbow brassiere.

'I know–I know! We've got a lot to do tonight, too! Come on, then, Mrs Audley …'

It was only much later, on the threshold of sleep and lulled by that soft snore to which he must henceforth accustom himself, that he thought again of Steerforth.

Somewhere out in the darkness, under the grass and the sheep not far away, lay the treasures of Troy. Priam's gold, Schliemann's gold and Steerforth's gold. And if, by some unlikely miracle, it came to the light again, it would be Nikolai Panin's gold.

And there was the unresolved puzzle, plaguing him still. The motives of the owner, the discoverer and the plunderer were crystal, but Panin's were opaque—

The Gold I gather
A King covets
For an ill use.

That was among the runes on Welland's sword—

It is not given
For goods or gear
But for The Thing.

As a child he had never grasped what Kipling had meant by 'The Thing', and now another Thing eluded him …

There was an insistent buzzing in his ear which he couldn't place. It refused to stop, and Faith's hair was tickling his face and Faith herself was stirring in his arms.

It was morning and the buzzing came from beyond Faith, from the pale green space age telephone beside the bed. As he reached over her she wound her arms round him sleepily. He knocked the receiver off its stand, fumbled for it and dragged it towards him by its coiled cable.

He groaned into it.

'Dr Audley–London call for you–putting you through now!'

Audley squinted at his watch. Seven-thirty and trouble: only trouble telephoned before nine o'clock.

'David? Are you there, Dr Audley?'

Audley admitted that he was, unwillingly.

'Stocker here, David. Sorry to rouse you early again. Have you got any closer to those boxes?'

Whatever made Stocker telephone him it wasn't to inquire after the progress of the treasure hunt. Not this early, anyway. He rubbed his chin, reminding himself unhappily that he'd have to get a razor from somewhere.

'To hell with the boxes! What's happened?'

Stocker laughed. His ability to exude good humour at this time of the morning was irritating. In fact there was a lot about Stocker that was potentially irritating, most of all that he probably knew better than Audley what was going on, and not least that he had probably never really expected the boxes to turn up.

'You're not even close to them, are you?'

'Not within a mile.'

'Well, you'd better pack things in and come on back to London. Our friend Panin has put his schedule forward a day — he's flying in this morning instead of tomorrow.'