Big enough, but wholly enigmatic. For no one seemed to know what made Panin tick and what kept him wound up. He hadn't been tagged as a coming man until after he had arrived, and then it was too late. They had simply never caught up with him.
Audley looked down at the thin file in front of him and the pathetic handful of notes he had made during the afternoon. Kremlinology was at best a foggy enterprise, more divination than detection, full of Delphic hypotheses about men whose passion for secrecy appeared at times to be pathological.
But Panin had raised this passion to an art form.
There wasn't an ounce of meat on the bones of the man's career. He had allegedly been at Moscow university before the war, and certainly returned to it afterwards, emerging as an acknowledged expert in the arts and customs of the ancient Scythians, for what that was worth. In between he had been a staff officer in Khalturin's crack division of Chuikov's army, and that in theory brought him to Berlin in 1945. But between the time he had been identified across the public bar of the Bull Inn, Newton Chester, dummy4
and his appearance at the famous Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, when Kruschev had denounced Stalin, nobody seemed to have set eyes on him. He had been as quiet as Steerforth.
So someone had been keeping Panin on ice among his Scythian burial mounds, in preparation for the better days between the Twentieth and Twenty-Second congresses. Yet he wasn't one of Kruschev's 'golden boys', like Polyansky: he was everybody's man and nobody's man.
Moreover he seemed to Audley to have the remarkable talent of knowing unerringly when to be somewhere else.
He had been as far away from the Kruschev faction in '64 as he had been from the doomed followers of Malenkov and Molotov in '57.
Even the single relationship which tied him in with the intelligence agencies was equivocal, through the last hypothetical co-ordinator of the KGB and the GRU, Mironov.
But Mironov was a Brezhnev appointment, and he had no links with Brezhnev. And when Mironov flew so mysteriously into a Yugoslav hillside four days after the fall of Kruschev, Panin was visiting a dig in the far-off Altai mountains.
Intelligent anticipation or inside intelligence? The file didn't say, and the bare facts wouldn't tell–and the facts about Panin always seemed to be weeks or months out of date when they finally filtered through.
Even Audley's own Middle Eastern knowledge was made useless by Panin's shrewd uninvolvement with unprofitable causes. If he had been in the ranks of the Shelepin-Semichastny followers dummy4
during Kruschev's defeat, he had been conspicuously absent from them when Kosygin clipped their wings during the June War-Glasboro period.
But a Kosygin man would surely not be on such friendly terms with Grechko, the bully of the East Germans and the Czechs . . .
except that any friend of Grechko ought not to be a friend of Moskalenko . . .
It was no use, no bloody use at all. The names and the convolutions of power swam before Audley's eyes. In the Middle East the protagonists were like old friends, whose reactions were at least partially predictable. But here he was among blank-faced technocrats and strangers, of whom Panin was the strangest of all.
It would take months of study before any of them would start to talk to him through their comings and goings, absences and appearances, and in the oracular reports of their words and deeds.
He had to find a short cut to the man's character, or at the very least, to his motivation in 1945.
Suddenly he realised that his line of thought had been interrupted.
Mrs Clark's geese, the guards of his privacy, had been disturbed; they were shrieking their displeasure at a car which was nosing its way up the track towards the house. He could see its headlights flashing intermittently between the overgrown hedgerows.
Courting couples occasionally tried the lane, which didn't look as if it was going anywhere when it left the main road. But nowadays the geese always intercepted them and drove them back. Yet this driver was not deterred; the headlights halted for two or three seconds near the glow of Mrs Clark's cottage, but then moved dummy4
forward again. It could only be coming to him now, thought Audley savagely, and it couldn't be a friend, since no friend of his would ever come calling casually.
The car finally emerged from the lane on to the broad expanse of cobbles, swinging round to stop precisely in front of the porch. It was a white Mini, a tiny toy of a car — nobody he knew drove such an object. But the driver seemed in no hurry to get out, and Audley dared to hope that the engine would start up again. Then the door opened and a tall, tweedy woman in glasses and headscarf climbed out.
Audley was halfway down the stairs to the front door before the bell clanged. If it was charity he would buy it off as quickly as possible, and if white elephants were required for some village occasion he would promise a whole herd of them.
He hardly ever used the main door, and was embarrassed to find that Mrs Clark, ever burglar-conscious, had shot both the huge iron bolts. And when he swung the heavy door open there was an agonised protest of ancient hinges which made him smile: it was altogether too like the opening sequence of a Hammer film, with himself as the ghoulish butler. The coming plea for Oxfam or jumble would be an anticlimax.
But his caller made no plea. She stood waiting in the pool of light, obviously expecting him to speak first.
'Can I help you?' he volunteered at last.
Now she was surprised, and it dawned on Audley that she knew him and had assumed that he knew her. For a long moment he dummy4
groped for her face in his memory, without success. Somebody's wife? Somebody's sister? Somebody's—
'Dr Audley, don't you remember that we met this morning. Faith Jones–Faith Steerforth?'
He made the identification as she spoke. Somebody's daughter! It was unpardonable, but her unexpected
