Koskill waited patiently while Havergal nodded knowingly to himself, his bitterness fading at the recollection of his cleverness in spotting the reason for it.
'Jacob Ryle couldn't bear the idea that any of his charity might be wasted – particularly after what happened to the railway. So he framed the organisation of the Foundation to avoid wasting money on trainees who wouldn't finish the course – or who didn't do what they'd been trained for.'
'Drop-outs, you mean?'
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'That's the modern jargon, yes,' Havergal nodded. 'Not enough intelligence or not enough guts. In the early days some of the local committees weren't too choosy – usually they were just trying to do favours for their friends. Ryle wouldn't stand for that, though; if a committee failed to deliver the right goods he changed the committee.
'After a time everyone got the message. There were still the odd failures, but they were rare – there were years when there weren't any that couldn't be explained.'
Ryle had wanted his money's worth, thought Roskill, and quite naturally the old bandit had applied his business methods to his charitable enterprise: shape up or get out. Once the tradition was established firmly all it needed was a competent statistical section to keep an eye on it.
'That was the pattern when I joined the Foundation – even lasted through the decade after Suez,' Havergal continued. 'But it began to change about six months after the June War.'
'You mean the drop-outs began?'
'The drop-outs. I didn't spot them at the time, of course. The figures take time to show up. And even then I didn't smell a rat until I realised that the wrong ones were quitting.'
Roskill nodded. The drift of the Colonel's argument was clear enough. The drop-outs of the old days would be due to stupidity, idleness or instability: the new drop-outs would be young men with exactly the opposite qualities, but with other fish to fry.
'And what have you done about it?'
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'Nothing at all.' Havergal gazed unblinkingly at Roskill. 'There's nothing I can do.'
'I thought you sacked committees that didn't deliver the goods?'
'We used to, but not any more. Times have changed since Jacob Ryle's days – and particularly since '56. We have to tread more delicately now. And the committees that are up to mischief aren't in my territory, anyway.'
The look in Havergal's eye suggested that times had not chiinged so much in his territory, and wouldn't change as long as he was in charge.
'Where are they?'
'Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – we've got fifteen committees in the four of them. According to my reckoning there are only seven doing their proper job now.'
'Whose territory would that be?' Roskill fumbled in his memory.
'Elliott Wilkinson's?'
Havergal pointed his chin at Roskill, his loyalty to the Foundation in collision with the plain implication of Roskill's question. It occurred to Roskill that if the Colonel already suspected Wilkinson of chicanery he probably had his own plans for dealing with him.
But there was no point in pressing the matter – it would only shut the old boy up altogether.
Roskill hurriedly led him off at a tangent. 'But all this is circumstantial evidence – statistical stuff. It takes one hell of a lot of statistics to make one piece of real truth.'
He looked at the Colonel narrowly. 'If you can supply us with dummy2
names and details of the drop-outs, that would be a start, anyway.
And names of the committee men too. If you can do that there's a fair chance I can get my bosses to cross- check them and leave the Foundation itself alone.'
Havergal thought for a time. 'If it ever got out there'd be hell to pay, Roskill.'
'If it doesn't get out there may be hell anyway. But I tell you what I'll do to prove good faith: I'll give you some of the names we've got. And I'll show you some of the faces we've got that haven't got names.'
He reached down beside the chair for the projector. This had been what the man had been after all along, and it was ironic that Roskill had intended from the start to give it to him: the names and faces of the Hassan suspects and every contact of theirs Cox had been able to dig from British files and coax from European ones.
Five suspects and twenty-five contacts: not a great many and most of them looked alike to Roskill anyway. But maybe Havergal, with all his years of Arabian experience, could distinguish them from one another. He might even do more, for as Cox had gently pointed out exactly half of them were graduates or officials of the Jacob Ryle Memorial Foundation Trust.
VII
ROSKILL LEANT GINGERLY against the wall of the Bunnock dummy2
Street phone box and listened to the buzz of the bell on the other end of the line, far away in Hampshire.
He settled down to wait, resigned in the knowledge that Audley would put off answering as long as possible in the hope that the noise would pack up and go away. His only hope of a speedy answer was Faith.
For the second time during the evening his eye was caught by the carefully inscribed line of Latin:
was 'tabernacle', but the idea of dying in a tabernacle was plainly ridiculous – the sort of guess he had chanced in Latin translations so often, only to elicit the Latin master's eternal complaint: nonsense
