'That's better!' The Master sank into the pew at right angles to where Butler was sitting. 'Now we shall not be interrupted under any circumstances!'
He turned to Butler. 'And now, Colonel Butler—you know we've had our little troubles here—students are news these days, and Oxford always has been news, more's the pity. Not so much this year—I fancy it is a little out of fashion for the moment—but I expect you read about it last year, eh?'
Butler nodded. He had seen the stories of sit-ins and demonstrations, for the most part ineffably tedious, as Audley had observed—except the affair of the Springboks cricket tour, which had mightily angered him, and the disgraceful insults offered recently to the Portuguese military delegation. He raked in his memory—and there had been much trouble about secret files allegedly kept on students and available to would-be employers, which was in his view a perfectly reasonable precaution.
'There was some business about files, wasn't there?'
'Files?' The Master smiled a thin smile. 'A good case in point, Butler—a very good case! My anonymous friend Mercurius Oxoniensis dealt with that most admirably in one of his letters in the Spectator—it showed how appallingly naive the dissidents were. As if we had the time (never mind the inclination) to bother ourselves recording undergraduates' petty misdemeanours! Anyone who knows Oxford would know that lack of files would be far more likely. But I'd like to come back to that later.'
'No, Butler. What alerted me was when one of my most promising students was arrested in London during the vacation—there was a demonstration against the odious Greek regime and he was taken in for assaulting a policeman.'
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'Was he guilty?'
The Master held up his hand. 'All in good time, Butler. He was arrested, and when they searched him they found a very considerable quantity of the drug LSD on him—far more than any one person could reasonably be expected to consume. So naturally the prosecution's case was that he intended to distribute it, and he was lucky to escape with a large fine and a suspended sentence. The point is that he denied it.'
'Of course!'
'Pray don't jump to conclusions. He denied assaulting the policeman—he said he was pushed—and he denied possessing the drug, which he claimed had been planted on him.'
'By the police?'
'That was what he thought, inevitably. I'm afraid the younger generation does not think our police are as wonderful as you and I do. Very few of them have had much experience with other police forces on which to build any sort of comparison. But I happened to know this young man very well— a brilliant boy. He would have gone a very long way.'
'Would have—but not with a drugs conviction?'
'I'm not sure that he wants to go far now. He is somewhat —disenchanted, shall we say? He disapproves of the system, and I can't say that I blame him. Because in this instance I believe he spoke the truth.'
'Master, are you saying that the police framed this boy? Because if you are—'
But of course that was precisely what he wasn't saying. He might have thought that at first, because for all his contempt for dissident undergraduates they were nonetheless part of his life and very much his responsibility. And a man like the Master of King's would know just where to apply his influence to find out whether some bent policeman was framing one of them.
Besides, it was written in that heavy-lidded stare: not the police either, therefore—
'So somebody else planted the drugs on him,' said Butler, 'and somebody else pushed him. You're sure of that?'
'It was not the police, of that I'm confident. And it was not the boy himself—he's idealistic and politically unsophisticated, but he's not belligerent and he's never been interested in drugs. And, Colonel
—he's not a
That was a point Butler could have argued. For though only an idiot would attend a demonstration with a dummy2.htm
pocketful of drugs, high common sense did not automatically accompany a high I.Q.
'I take your point, Master. But one swallow doesn't make a summer. So there's more, I presume.'
'There have been other incidents. Not always drug cases, but always nasty ones—the sort of thing that ruins a career and sours the victim. And always involving particularly able young men. I was talking to Dr Gracey, of Cumbria, just recently, and he told me he'd lost two very promising people last autumn.'
He shook his head to himself at the enormity of it. 'And there have been others. Too many for my liking. And too many for coincidence.'
Butler rubbed his chin doubtfully. This was substantially what Audley had said. But Audley had not radiated his usual confidence.
'Let me get this straight, Master,' he began slowly. 'You believe the Russians are deliberately taking advantage of student unrest. But, you know, I find it very hard to believe they'd bother themselves with such a trivial enterprise. They're very hard-headed as a rule.'
The Master regarded him in silence for a time.
'Hard-headed . . . Yes, I would be inclined to agree with you there, Colonel,' he said at length, with more than a touch of frost in his voice. 'As it happens, I am not without experience of them myself. And I have never subscribed to the foolishly tolerant views of some of my colleagues. In fact, I fancy I understand the nature of the beast—the true nature of the beast—better than most people.'
The nature of the beast. Now Butler understood the origins of Audley's uncertainty: an obsession was an unreliable starting point for any investigation.
'But first—' the frosty voice cut into his doubts—'I would quarrel with your assumption of triviality.'
