Colonel Butler's Wolf

New Zealand. But that was no great problem really, his parents were dead, but they'd left him enough money to put himself through one of the cramming establishments over here. He had a letter from his headmaster in New Zealand and another from an Anglican bishop out there.'

'Forged, naturally. Or stolen.'

The Master shrugged. 'He had enough 'O' levels, and when he'd taken our scholarship examination we jumped at him. He was a promising man, as I've said.'

It was too easy, all too easy: it was like taking candy from a baby. Audley had mentioned that UCCA was about to computerise itself, but as it was the checking was minimal. Up here the good brain validated the credentials: nobody really cared about a man's origins, but only about his potential. After all, it was a university, not a top security establishment.

That had been Audley's final comment—and it didn't seem to worry him very much either. But it made Butler shiver as he remembered Sir Geoffrey's contemptuous dismissal of the student files controversy : rather was there a near-criminal lack of guards at the gates of these ivory towers. Small wonder they had enemies within!

And yet—damn and blast it—these were British ivory towers, Butler told himself angrily. Freedom from the interference of bureaucratic snoopers ought to be part of a Briton's birthright: it was only the lesser breeds who were hounded by their ever-suspicious masters.

Butler cocked his head as the thought developed inside it: that might even be near the heart of this part of the problem ... it might very well be the heart itself.

A good mind, a steady mind—Hobson would not be wrong about that. And a good, steady mind which had been exposed to three years of Oxford.

'Would you say he was a young man of independent mind?'

'Sm— Zoshchenko?'

'Perhaps we'd do better to call him Smith.' He was forgetting Audley's exhortation already. 'Was he a man of independent mind?'

'Independent . . .' The Master examined the word. 'No, hardly that. He was too young to be truly independent, whatever he may have thought.'

'Isn't that what you teach them to be here?'

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'Teach them?' Sir Geoffrey almost chuckled. 'We don't teach them. They have to reach their destination under their own steam—we merely point them in the general direction of truth.'

It was difficult to tell whether he was joking. But then, as he stared at Butler, the meaning of the questions came home to him, and the sparse eyebrows raised in surprise.

Butler nodded.

'God bless my soul!' muttered Sir Geoffrey. 'You mean to imply that we succeeded with him ?'

It wouldn't have been a sudden blinding flash on the road to Damascus, thought Butler. With that good, steady mind it might have been no more than a small nagging doubt at first —a small thing compared with the pleasure of pulling the wool over the eyes of all these clever old men. But what he would not have known was that the clever men were working on him too: that the tiny doubt was a poison working and spreading inside him, working and growing as he was admitted to their ranks until—

Until what?

Never mind that for the time being. Whatever it was, it had been just that bit too much for him; he had become one of them, the man with his own Cause—or at least the Cause of Holy Russia, buried deep inside him, and the division of loyalties had split his Slav temperament right down the middle . . . Wasn't it Hamlet that the Russians so enjoyed, with its dark vein of self-destruction?

Butler himself had no time for Hamlet, who seemed to him to have been in a fair way of doing damn all in cold blood until his uncle's stupid treachery had given him the hot-blooded excuse for action.

But that was how the thing might have happened, with some final dirty instruction pushing poor Zoshchenko- Smith to resolve his dilemma with a drunken motor-cycle ride through the night—a sort of motorised Russian roulette.

Certainly, everything he had found out so far, from Pett's Pond to King's chapel, bore out that theory.

'And that would mean that in effect he committed suicide ?' said Sir Geoffrey, staring at him.

'I seem to remember that you suggested as much in your letter. Does it surprise you now?'

Sir Geoffrey gestured peevishly. 'So I did, so I did! But in retrospect I felt that it was not wholly in character. It was— how can I put it—an inexact way of approaching the problem. Not like Smith, at all.'

'But perhaps like Zoshchenko, Master. You must remember that we're dealing with two men now, not one. And neither of them was quite himself.' Butler paused. 'Besides, if it was like that it wasn't truly dummy2.htm

suicide—at least not when he set out. It was more like daring fate to settle things for him— maybe he had his own people on his tail by then and he knew he was on his way to betraying everything he'd worked for.'

'His own people? You mean the KGB or something like that?'

Butler shrugged. 'Something like that.'

'Could they have been responsible, Butler?'

'Honestly, Master—I think not. There's no evidence of it as yet. But to be sure of it I'd need to talk to someone much closer to him than you've been. Do you know of anyone who fills that bill ? He had friends, you say?'

'Hmm . . .' Sir Geoffrey frowned heavily into space. 'I do indeed, Butler—I do indeed.'

He raised his eyes to Butler's, still frowning, and then fell silent again.