I suppose you peacetime soldiers haven't seen so much of it—but I have always found life much more surprising than death.'
Butler clenched his back teeth. 'Is it of any significance that he was floating face downwards? Would you have expected him to float that way?'
The corner of Fox's mouth twitched. 'Oh, come now, Colonel—Butler was it?—if the object of this interview is to bandy old wives' tales, then we shall both be wasting our time. If you want to create a mystery where there is none, nothing I say is likely to prevent you doing so. But you must try not to ask stupid questions.'
Butler cursed Audley and his clever little bits of verse as he felt the situation slipping from his grasp. He had plainly bodged things to the point where they were doing little more than fence with each other.
Only a flag of truce could save him now.
He bowed his head. 'I'm sorry, doctor—you are the expert and I'm a pig-headed layman. The plain truth is that this man Smith died very inconveniently for us, and very conveniently for someone else, so we have to be sure about his death. We're not looking for a mystery, but if there is one we daren't overlook it. And—well, surely you must have had some reservations if you felt a post-mortem was necessary?'
Fox stared at Butler thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded slowly. 'Not quite a layman, colonel—
it's true that I considered a post-mortem necessary. But when there are none of the classical signs of drowning, and no visible injuries either, then it's perfectly normal.'
'Would you have expected such signs?'
'Not at all. Minor injuries or the absence of them aren't significant. In a case like this it's merely a question of drawing deductions—a process of exclusion, really.'
dummy2.htm
'And you concluded—?'
Fox shrugged. 'Vagal inhibition is my guess—sudden shock mediated through the vagus nerve, the
'wanderer'. I won't bore you with technicalities, but it's a very expeditious way of dying. Sir Bernard Spilsbury proved that, when he damn near killed a nurse by way of demonstrating it in a murder case.'
'Spilsbury?' Butler frowned. 'Would that have been the brides-in-the-bath case?'
'That's right.' Fox smiled grimly. 'Up with their heels— and it was all over!' He paused. 'And now I take it you'd like to know whether somebody upped with Smith's heels and then dumped him in the pond?'
'That would be helpful, doctor.'
'I'm sure it would be! But I'm afraid I can't help you that way at all.' He leant forward, elbows comfortably on the table. 'You see, the difficulty with most drownings is that the actual process is the same whether it's accident or suicide —or murder. And that's why I keep all my wits about me when I meet this sort of case. And why I do a p.m. so often.'
'In this instance there was very little water in the lungs, which is what I'd expect. But it was definitely pond water, with enough weed fragments to prove it. No doubt at all. In fact there was nothing there incapable of rational explanation; add the alcohol and you can call it either accident or involuntary suicide. Myself I'd prefer to call it waste and stupidity, whatever he'd done that brings you here.'
'Except, of course, I can only tell you what the state of his body tells me. What you want—and what I can't give you, colonel—is the state of his mind.'
VIII
BY THE TIME the train reached the outskirts of Oxford Butler had worked himself into a fairly irascible frame of mind.
Having to abandon his comfortable, convenient Rover at Reading and surrender himself to British Rail had not helped, even though he had seen the force of Audley's argument that the false Colonel Butler ought not to launch himself in the real Colonel Butler's car.
Yet he recognised that the true cause of his disquiet was the outcome of the Pett's Pond visit. For Dr Fox's conclusions fitted his own instinct far too well to be ignored: all the evidence pointed to the purely accidental nature of Smith's death. And although there was no consequential reason to doubt his Zoshchenko identity, his connection with the KGB or any other of the Soviet overseas agencies now dummy2.htm
seemed to rest solely on a chance word embedded in the memory of an aged don who had wined and dined well before he put his ear to the phone.
True, that was exactly the sort of intelligence fragment that Audley relished—and in fairness to Audley (however much it hurt) it had to be admitted that the blighter had a nose for such things.
Also, the fact that Smith's parents were conveniently dead and all those who knew him conveniently far off in New Zealand certainly made him a likely candidate for such a substitution. So the pros and cons seemed to balance in an annoyingly inconclusive fashion, and there weren't really very many solid facts either.
He glared down at the printed page on his lap : there was no shortage of facts there. Oldchesters fort—
Ortolanacum according to the Notitia Dignitatum, or Ortoligium if one preferred the later Ravenna Cosmography—measured 200 metres by 130, enclosing rather more than five acres, and had variously housed 500 mounted men or a thousand infantry. In the reign of Severus it had housed the 1st Lusitanians for a time and had then been the undoubted home of the 7th Dacians, a crack cavalry regiment drawn from one of the great horse tribes the Romans had conquered.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to be transplanted from the plains of the Danube to the wild north-west frontier of the Empire.
It was not really so far from his imagination at all: in their day the East Lancashire Rifles, drawn from the smoggy cities of industrial England, had frozen on the rim of the world above the Khyber Pass on another north- west frontier. That was fifteen hundred years later, but the price and obligation of empire, no matter whose empire, was still the same: some men must live and die far from home without questioning their fate. Indeed, it was the natural order of things, natural for the Dacians as it had been for the East Lanes.
Butler sighed. The
