and retraced his way to where the Triumph was parked among the pines. He unlocked the boot and replaced the binoculars and the sheet. Shutting it he glimpsed his reflection in the shining cellulose, distorted and wholly unrecognisable. In leather jerkin, flat cap and gumboots – and with the ludicrous beard – he wasn't quite sure what he resembled. An itinerant Basque revolutionary, perhaps, but hardly a pirate and certainly not a stray G.P.O.
linesman. Equally, however, not his elegant self.
He stumped off heavily down the hillside. The break in the weather hadn't lasted, thank God; the ground was still wet, but was drying fast, which was just as well if there was going to be much crawling about like this. It was no use telling himself that he was a country boy, born and bred, for over recent years he had become half- naturalised into a townsman. Not that this little bit of heath, field and woodland was true countryside; anything close to London as this was little better than the enclosures at Regent's Park Zoo, open space preserved to give the human animals the illusion of a natural setting.
He shook his head. If there was nothing left to show that the wires had been deliberately brought down, should he invent evidence to keep Audley happy? It had been what he had originally intended, after all, before the possible truth of it had dawned on him. Yet Audley had taken little convincing; it was almost as though he'd welcomed the idea, despite his previous intransigence. Perhaps deep down he knew that he wasn't quite big enough to turn Llewelyn away.
Or perhaps it was simply that the logic of Roskill's solution made dummy2
such crude proof unnecessary. It was there in the events themselves: every step of the car theft and booby- trapping had been marked by the same contradictory cleverness and stupidity.
But the cleverness and the stupidity had both been carefully calculated to lead directly to the removal of the fatal bug by an expert – and by one expert in particular.
The Jenkins Gambit, Audley had called it:
And it had so very nearly worked, too. With someone as important as Llewelyn menaced, Jenkins was almost certain to be overlooked. The assassins could not reasonably have expected anyone like Roskill, with a personal commitment to sharpen his perception, to appear on the scene – and even he had only stumbled on the more likely truth by accident.
The only real flaw in their planning was the telephone wire: the coincidence that had alerted Roskill. They should have waited until Jenkins came on duty by normal routine — unless for some reason they were unable to wait, in which case it was not a flaw, but a calculated risk...
At least finding the place had been easy enough. Although the repair men had worked on the other side of the hedge their vehicles had chewed up the roadside verge, deeply rutting the debris of the previous summer. He had had no difficulty spotting it on his early morning reconnaissance drive along the road, in the half-light.
The tree itself, contrary to Butler's report, had not come down – it merely leaned drunkenly away from the road, ten degrees out of dummy2
true. The damage had been done by a huge dead limb which appeared to have snapped off two-thirds of the way up. Falling in the field it had brought down Maitland's wires and conveniently left the main cable intact.
Roskill squelched his way over the ruined verge. The elm had grown up on the far side of a deep roadside ditch; with its one-sided root system – he could see the stumps of roots which had been severed when the ditch had last been cleaned out – it was hardly surprising that it had started to fall away from the road.
Elms, he remembered, were notoriously unstable at the best of times.
He peered up at the new scar high up on the trunk where the limb had been ripped away. There were no signs of saw marks, nor any tell-tale sawdust scattering at the base either. It looked depressingly like a natural break, the result of the extra pressure when the tree canted over.
Not for the first time he felt a touch of doubt chilling his beautiful theory. It would be damned embarrassing if he was forced to double-cross Audley into making a fool of Llewelyn. Worse, if Jenkins wasn't the target it was Audley who would be made to look the fool, and Audley would be a nasty enemy to make in the department.
He launched himself clumsily across the ditch, throwing his weight forward and embracing the elm as the soft earth crumbled under him.
The grass on the other side of the hedge was also torn and trampled dummy2
and sprinkled with legitimate sawdust, where the fallen limb had been cut up into manageable sections and stacked. It was good burning wood, too, dead but not rotten.
Dead, but not rotten: there was something maybe not quite right about that. He ran his eye up the trunk again: it was odd how the great branch hadn't fallen in a line with the tree itself – yet if it had done so it would almost certainly have missed Maitland's wires. As it was it had peeled off towards the left, almost as though it had been ... pulled.
Pulled! He kicked himself mentally for missing the simplest method of all: hitch a cable to the dead branch and pull obliquely.
It was not only the obvious way but virtually the only way, and he'd been a monumental idiot not to see it at once.
And yet it would take immense strength to do it – not only bringing down the branch, but also very nearly the tree itself. It would take more than manpower to do that.
He looked up at the elm again, then down to the torn turf, trying to gauge the likely direction from which the pulling had been done. It had to be out in the field to the left of the wires.
He moved carefully away from the hedge, searching the ground intently. It had been dry on that night, and for some days before, but this land was low lying. Further out in the field there were tussocks of coarse marsh grass. It would never be less than damp here.
Hardly more than twenty yards from the elm, and somewhat closer dummy2
to the hedge than he had expected, were four symmetrical bruises in the grass where the wheels had spun for
