on the move towards Audley. But it was the journalists who first introduced him to Steerforth. In
AIRCRAFT is FOUND above a superb photograph.
Both introductions were incomplete, for the first facts were vague.
It was as yet simply an echo of a supposedly wartime tragedy, with names withheld. But it was the picture and not the text that stirred Audley's imagination in any case. It reminded him of another picture he had seen years before of the barnacle-covered bones of a Lancaster bomber which had appeared briefly on a North Sea sandbank during an exceptionally low tide. The Dakota in the lake shared the same atmosphere of loneliness and loss, which not even the self-conscious airmen in gumboots posed beside-it could altogether dissolve.
But where Audley had looked and read, and then had turned to another page, there were others who had read between the lines —
painstaking, unimaginative men chosen for their retentive memories, whose job it was never to forget names and faces.
Steerforth and his Dakota had been on their lists as long as any of them could remember, unremarked until tracked down at long last.
Even then it was not their business to ask questions; to take the appropriate action had always been the limit of their satisfaction.
Yet that in the end was enough to make Steerforth's resurrection certain and to set Audley's phone ringing before dawn just one week later.
As a child Audley had feared and hated the telephone bell. At the dummy4
first ring he was off like a jack-rabbit in search of cover, desperate to avoid being sent to answer it. When cornered he was always too nervous to listen properly, but stood sweating and tongue-tied until the exasperated caller rang off. 'Is the boy deaf or just plain stupid?' he remembered his father ask rhetorically.
Long since he had taken the measure of the beast, but his hatred remained. He would not have it beside his bed, and even the Department now accepted that no one should phone him at home except in the direst emergency.
That knowledge, and the looseness of his pyjama cord, filled his half-awake mind as he shuffled unhappily through the house, fumbling, blinking and grunting as he switched on each light in turn. Only in the direst emergency . . .
It was one of Fred's middlemen. Disarmingly apologetic, deferential, precise–and leaving not a millimetre for argument.
He replaced the receiver and settled his glasses firmly on his nose.
To be hauled out of his warm soft bed at such an hour was bad enough. To be then summoned to London at the same hour was worse: it suggested that someone had been caught with his trousers down, or his pyjama trousers even.
But to be required in addition to dress for a funeral–that was utterly ridiculous!
Funerals meant going outside, into the field, among strangers. And he was not a field man, never had been and never wanted to be.
The back room among the files and the reports was his field. It was far more interesting there, more rewarding and infinitely more dummy4
comfortable. And it was the only place he was any good.
He sat at his desk, staring into the night outside. No one he knew had died recently. He focused on the darkness and his mind wandered away into it. Two hours to dawn maybe; the dying time now, when those who had fought hardest in their hospital beds suddenly gave up the struggle. This hour, this blackness, suddenly reminded him of long-forgotten boarding school ends-of-term. The boys with the furthest to go got up now, all excitement, to catch the earliest trains. He had caught a much later train, with no particular joy.
Methodically he switched on the tea machine, showered, drank the tea. The Israelis were certainly not up to anything. Shapiro could be relied on there at least. And the Russian ships were in the wrong place for the Arabs to try anything important.
Uncalled for and long forgotten end-of-term memories intruded.
He remembered the boy in the next bed for the first time in over twenty years. Which was interesting: it meant that the right key unlocked a whole set of memories, and then one could recall and clarify the past, flexing the memory like the muscles.
Whose funeral? Half-dressed, trailing a faint smell of mothballs and fumbling with his ancient black tie, Audley decided he was hungry. But there was no time and his funereal suit reminded him that he had to watch his weight now. Where once the trousers had needed braces, now they were self-supporting.
He opened the safe and removed the files on which he had been working. Ever since May '67 they had expected marvels from him.
And that had been no miracle, but mere exasperation and lurking dummy4
sympathy for the Israelis. They had ignored it, anyway, just as they had ignored the Lebanese report and the Libyan one before it.
Audley sighed. It was not Fred's fault, he thought. Fred was good.
Perhaps it was his own fault, a defect in presentation. The difficult thing is not the answer, he reflected, but the working.
The light grew as he drove. No rain today, but a cold, unseasonable wind, just right for a funeral to cull the weaker mourners. The countryside was only just waking up, but the towers of London were already ablaze with light, and there was much more traffic than he expected. Every year it started earlier and ended later, and one day
