man-made.
'This will do,' Butler muttered. He stopped and turned to McLachlan, who had fallen half-a-dozen paces behind him. 'I've got some instructions for you.'
'Instructions?'
'Orders would be more accurate.'
McLachlan grinned at him uncertainly. 'More orders? We've not finished, do you mean? I hope to God they aren't too complicated.'
'They're not complicated.' Butler stared directly into the wary eyes. 'And this really is the finish, boy.
The game's over.'
'What game?'
'Our game—and your game. All you have to do is to go back from here and pack your things up. Don't bother to see Epton—we'd rather you simply left him a note saying you've had to return to Oxford to see Sir Geoffrey Hobson—'
'See the Master? What about?'
'You aren't going to see him. You will write him a letter. You'll tell him you're resigning your scholarship and you're leaving Oxford.'
'Leaving—?' McLachlan tossed the damp hair across his forehead. 'Are you crazy?'
'We want it in writing, but you can keep it short. Tell him the family business makes it necessary for you to return to Rhodesia.'
'Rhodesia! I'm damned if I—'
Butler overrode the angry words. 'Of course we don't expect you to go there. There's a ship in the Pool dummy2.htm
of London that will suit you better—the Baltika. You have my word that no one will stop you going aboard.'
McLachlan stared at him incredulously.
A good one, thought Butler with dispassionate approval. And a good one would quite naturally play to the last ball of the last over. It made it all the easier to obey Audley's parting words: we don't want any trouble, so don't make it too difficult for him. Just make the lie stick.
'It's over, lad—all kaput,' he began gruffly. 'It never did stand a chance, even before Zoshchenko cracked up.'
McLachlan continued to stare at him for one long, bitter moment. Then slowly, almost as if the hands were disobeying the brain, the muzzle of the shotgun came up until it was in line with Butler's stomach.
Only it wasn't McLachlan any more.
It was subjective, of course; Butler knew that even as he recalled the Master's words, 'He's more mature than the usual run of undergraduates'.
And yet not wholly subjective, because the acceptance of failure was putting back those concealed years into the face, just as it must have done with Zoshchenko as his hold on Neil Smith's identity weakened at the last. Now he was watching the same struggle for that inner adjustment: he was watching the false McLachlan wither and die.
What was left was older and harder—this had been the vital half of the pair, after all. But it was still a pathetically young face, even over the shotgun's mouth.
'Don't be foolish now,' said Butler gently. 'Not when we're giving you the easy way out.'
McLachlan licked a runnel of rain from his lip. 'The— easy way?'
'Aye. I meant what I said: we're letting you go home. You've been damn lucky, lad. If Zoshchenko hadn't gone sour on you, we might have let you go and hang yourself. I think we would have done, too.'
The damp strands of straw hair fell forward across the face again. Viking hair, thought Butler. But then he had read somewhere that the Vikings had also sailed eastwards, down the Russian rivers, leaving their ruthless seed there as well as in the West.
The young man licked his lips again.
dummy2.htm
'I could have sworn you didn't know. At the bridge, I mean—' McLachlan bit off the end of the sentence as though ashamed of it.
Butler shook his head slowly. A touch of truth now, to gild the big untruth.
'I didn't know, not then. You weren't my business.' Let the boy wonder which of his friends hadn't been his friend. 'I didn't know until yesterday afternoon.'
'Yesterday afternoon?'
'McLachlan was partially left-handed, wasn't he?'
'Yes, but—'
'Oh, you were good. You must have put in a great deal of practice. I didn't notice anything wrong, anyway.'
'I don't understand. If you didn't notice anything wrong, what did you notice?'
'You made me think, lad, you made me think! You see, your left-handedness—or McLachlan's—is the rarer variety. There are plenty who bat right-handed and bowl left—Denis Compton does, and so does Derek Underwood
