Colonel Butler's Wolf

But they won't grow up like this, he thought sadly.

'Let me get you a drink, Miss Epton. And something to eat too.'

'That's kind of you but golly—nothing to eat here. I'm much too much of a fattypuff to dare to eat stodge at lunch-time. But if I could maybe have a half of bitter—I shouldn't have that really—but just a half.'

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From the bar he watched her fumbling with the buttons of her shiny raincoat as she sat down, shaking her thick mop of light brown hair. She was truly a little too plump for the mini-skirt she was wearing, even allowing for the fact that it was a fashion he'd never quite learnt to accept. But then he'd never quite learnt to accept any such fashionable extremes, and at least it was more becoming on her than the Bulgarian peasant outfits he had observed in London. Indeed, on her the mini looked surprisingly innocent, no denying that.

And no denying that it was nevertheless a long way from any sort of mourning. Yet he fancied that even this apparent cheerfulness was less than her natural high spirits; there was a restraint to it, a shadow almost.

'Uncle Geoff said on the phone that I couldn't mistake you—thanks awfully—but I thought I had, you know. You didn't look as though you were expecting me.'

'I was—ah—thinking about something else I'm afraid, day-dreaming,' he began lamely, unable to bring himself to ask her to reveal what had been so unmistakable about him. The red hair, no doubt, and the prizefighter's face!

She sipped her beer, watching him over the rim of the glass, and then set it down carefully on the table between them. 'Uncle Geoff said you wanted to talk to me about Neil,' she said with childlike directness. 'Is that right?'

'That's quite right.'

'He said that I must answer all your questions, but I mustn't ask any of mine—is that right too?'

'More or less—yes, Miss Epton.'

'It sounds a bit one-sided to me.' She looked at him with frank curiosity. 'He made me promise I wouldn't split on him—or on you. And he made you sound rather like the Lone Ranger.'

'The Lone Ranger?'

'Your mask is on The Side of Good.'

'My mask?'

'Well, he said if anyone asked about you I'm to say you're an old friend of the family. I didn't quite twig whose family. Mine I suppose—Neil didn't have much in the way of relatives, apart from a dotty aunt in New Zealand.'

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He looked at her, trying to see through the veil of flippancy. Apolitical, Sir Geoffrey had said—not intellectual, but not stupid either. A nice, ordinary girl, even a little old-fashioned by modern standards—

it would be a mercy if that were true!

'I think we'd best leave it vague, Miss Epton. Say just a friend, never mind whose.'

'But are you a friend?' She paused. 'Except that's a question, isn't it. It is asking rather a lot, you know—

answers but no questions.'

It was asking rather a lot, he could see that. And there was nothing so corrosive of discretion as unsatisfied curiosity— that applied to men and women equally. But how much to tell, and how much to leave untold?

'Suppose you wait and hear the questions. Then you can decide whether or not you can answer them.'

He tried to speak gently, but as always it came out merely gruffly. It would have to be the usual mixture of truth and lies, after all. 'But I tell you this, Miss Epton: I think Neil would have counted me a friend—

and I promise you he would have answered if he'd been here now.'

'If he'd been here now . . .' She echoed him miserably, the shadow across her face suddenly pronounced. 'If only he could be here! I still can't quite believe that he's never going to be here again, that he's never going to come in through the door—' She looked past him into nowhere, her flippancy altogether gone. 'Did you ever meet him?'

Butler shook his head sympathetically. This way might be the wrong one, but it might get some of the answers without questions.

'He was a super person, more fun to be with than anyone. And everyone liked him because there was no pretence about him—' She looked at him again.

Butler felt his face turn to stone. This child would have married the fellow—it was true.

And where would it have ended then? In the maximum security wing? Or in a dacha outside Moscow?

And for sure across the pages of the News of the World and with hurt and bitterness. He longed suddenly to be able to tell her that of all the inevitable unhappy endings this was the happiest she could have hoped for.

'I'm sorry, Colonel—I'm not usually emotional like this.' She looked at him sadly, misinterpreting his expression. 'I can see that you are a friend after all now.'

'Polly!'

A huge, mop-headed fair-haired young man in a patched and shabby sports jacket loomed at his shoulder.

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'Come on, Polly—have a beer and to hell with the calories!' exclaimed the young man cheerfully.

'Hullo, Dan,' she replied with equal cheerfulness that was ruined by a single mascara-stained tear which rolled down her cheek. 'Colonel Butler—meet the white hope of the black Rhodesians, Dan McLachlan.'