fulfilled hers as correctly as he carried out his, one way or another. It was always more pleasant if it could be done with a smile, but he no longer expected that luxury.
'Now, Matron,' he said unemotionally, 'just when is Squadron Leader Roskill likely to be on his feet again?'
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It was enough, and had always been enough, and always would be enough, to be on the Queen's service.
II
'J. DINGLE—TWO RINGS' was inscribed on a piece of plain cardboard in a cellophane holder on the left of the door.
Butler sniffed, picking up the faint tang of sea air, and scrutinised the inscription. The letters were spidery and slightly shaky, which fitted in with what the lodge-keeper at Eden Hall had told him : 'old Mr Dingle' had been in both the World Wars, which placed him well into his seventies at the least.
He sniffed again. It seemed unlikely that J. Dingle would remember anything useful about the late Neil Smith even if he lived up to the lodge-keeper's assertion that in the matter of old pupils of Eden Hall
'old Mr Dingle was bound to know'. Smith had likely been an inky fourteen-year-old when Dingle had last seen him, and that not less than nine years before. The real pay-dirt, whatever dirt there was in Smith's short career, would be in the more recent levels. This visit to Westcliffe-on-Sea was no more than routine.
But that thought, once weighed and evaluated, pleased and invigorated Butler, and he reached forward and rang the bell, two firm, decisive rings. Routine action generally proved fruitless, and was normally boring, but it could never be regarded as wasteful. Rather, it was proof that whoever was co-ordinating an operation was leaving nothing to chance, and that was how Butler liked things to be.
Beyond the red and green glass panels of the door someone was stirring : J. Dingle, summoned by his two rings. It was a comfortless, solid house, redbrick and bourgeois, dating from the days when Westcliffe-on-Sea tradesmen could afford to tuck a servant or two in the attics under the eaves. And now, built just too far from the sea to decline into a boarding house, it had turned into a respectable nest of small flats for single retired people whose private pensions or prudently invested savings enable them to scorn state aid.
Among whom was J. Dingle: the door swung open and Butler and J. Dingle considered each other in silence for a moment.
'Mr Dingle?'
A small nod. Butler drew his identification folder from his breast pocket and politely offered it to the old man. With the elderly, courtesy was their right as well as his duty.
'I,wonder if I might have a few words with you, Mr Dingle?' Dingle stared at Butler over his half-glasses with eyes that seemed much younger than the rest of his face— bright, birdlike eyes set in wizened and folded skin which reminded Butler of the brazils that had appeared in his home every dummy2.htm
Christmas to linger on in their bowl for months because no one had the patience to crack them.
The eyes left Butler's face at last in order to examine the folder, flicking back to compare the face with the photograph, then lowering again to decipher the small print.
At length the examination was complete and the eyes returned, still without expression—it was as though Dingle's three-score years and ten had exhausted his ability to react outwardly to any event, no matter how unlooked-for.
'You'd better come inside then, Major Butler,' the old man beckoned abruptly with a mottled, claw-like hand into the dark hallway in which the light from outside picked out the highlights of polished woodwork and linoleum.
Butler waited for him to close the door, and then followed him down the passageway, stooping uneasily, to avoid a ceiling which he guessed was far above his head. Now that he was inside it, the house seemed to press in on him.
He was not prepared for the room into which Dingle finally ushered him, a high, well-proportioned room, full of leather-bound books and photographs in silver frames jostling each other on small mahogany tables. There was a fire bright with smokeless fuel in the hearth and a smell of good tobacco.
The pity he had begun to feel for Dingle was transmuted instantly into something close to envy—'poor old Mr Dingle' became 'lucky old Dingle'.
The old man pointed to a chair on one side of the fire, waiting until Butler had sunk himself into it before settling in one on the other side of the fireplace.
'Just what is it that you want of me?'
'Some information.'
'Tck ! Tck !' Dingle clucked pettishly. 'Of course you want information. I may be ancient, but I'm not senile. And I recognise one of those signatures on that little card of yours— though he was only a junior civil servant when I knew him.'
Butler frowned, momentarily at a loss, and Dingle pounced on him.
'Not done your homework, Major?' The lipless mouth puckered briefly and then tightened again.
'Perhaps I am leaping to a false conclusion about your arcane purposes. But there was a time in the Second War when I ran errands between MID and NID, and I recall
Not senile, thought Butler, certainly not senile—even if he had jumped to a conclusion. It was, after all, dummy2.htm
a reasonable conclusion in the circumstances, however coincidental those might actually be.
But it was strange to think of this skeletal old gentleman striding down corridors which he himself used.
Butler's eyes strayed involuntarily to the framed photographs on the table beside him. Individuals in cap and gown, team groups in the comically long shorts of yesterday's sports or immaculate in striped blazers and white flannels; Dingle had been a sportsman in his faraway youth. There was even a group of officers and men dating, by
