October Men

been chancing their arm recently, there ought to be one by now.

But Richardson knew enough now not to waste deep thought dummy2

on infinite possibilities, which could vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. Better to conduct a requiem in his mind for the Guinness, which would be a ruddy sight dearer now, and for little Bernadette, who might worry for a day or two about the sudden disappearance of her passionate Italian boyfriend. She'd probably blame the British, as she always did, and just this once she'd be dead right.

Then he saw the familiar signpost.

It was like the poet said—Chapman's Homer and stout what's-'is-name silent on his peak in Darien: Upper Horley meant Steeple Horley, and Steeple Horley meant David Audley, and David Audley meant something one hundred per cent better than pissing around Dublin pubs on wet evenings.

He hadn't asked the driver because it was bad form as well as agin' the rules to ask. But now he didn't need to pop the question: It was David.

David was a shit, and maybe you couldn't trust him much.

And there were times when he was more than a bit of a bore, when he started theorising and moralising and soul-searching.

But David was also nobody's yes-man. He didn't give one damn for the bosses—he had proved that when the crunch came. And—this above all—David always got the really interesting jobs which nobody else dared touch. At least, he always got 'em in the end.

He grinned to himself and stretched for sheer joy—and dummy2

caught the driver beside him grinning too. So the man had noticed his reaction to the signpost, and understood it and even shared it. And that was interesting in itself, if not a brand new piece of information: it was the people below David who liked him, for his courtesy if for nothing else, while the people alongside and just above him disliked him in what was probably an inverse ratio to how much they needed him.

Good old David! There were inverted chevrons on his coat-of-arms, which was carved over the door of the Old House, but there ought to have been two fingers, raised and improper.

The shock came when they were halfway up the drive to the house, when the rain-caped policeman materialised out of a gap in the hedge to stop the car.

The driver clicked the door lock and wound down the window the regulation half-inch.

'We're expected,' he said casually, before the policeman could speak. 'Bennett and Captain Richardson.'

'Would you please show me your identification, sir?'

'After I've seen your warrant card.'

Face immobile, the policemen felt under his cape for the folder and then posted it through the gap. Behind him Richardson could see a civilian and another uniformed man.

He caught a glimpse of sergeant's stripes on the arm that was lifted to take back the warrant card and collect their own dummy2

folders.

They'd got a sergeant on the gate, checking the visitors—a sergeant in the rain, doing the job while his underlings looked on. Christ! It shook him almost as much as the first sight of the high blue helmet: first the discretion—no police cars parked in view anywhere so far— and then this too-high-ranking gateman, two sure signs of the worst sort of trouble.

The car crawled up the last few yards of drive slowly, and the house was still standing at least. But neither David's new grey Austin nor Faith's white Mini were among the half dozen cars parked in the forecourt. He scanned them for one he could identify, but without success.

'Captain Richardson?'

Another policeman had come out to intercept them. The place was crawling with them.

'Would you like to go straight in, sir?'

Inside the front door there was another policeman. And there was also Oliver St. John Latimer.

Richardson and Oliver St. John Latimer regarded each other with concealed distaste. Ordinarily he would not have worried Richardson in the least, because although he was considerably senior and brainier, he was also in Richardson's carefully considered opinion a pompous, arse-licking timeserver—you couldn't throw a snowball at Sir Frederick Clinton's backside without hitting Fatso in the back of the neck.

dummy2

But he was also an enemy of David's, and here he was walking about David's house as though he owned it, with an insufferably smug smile on his chops. So it was necessary to tread a little carefully.

'Where's David?' Richardson smiled sweetly. 'And where's Faith, come to that? What's up?'

Latimer returned the smile with a smirk. 'You'd better ask Brigadier Stacker, old boy.'

'I'll do just that when I know where he is—or is that a secret too?'

'Just follow me, old boy.'

Fighting off the temptation to kick the fat backside undulating just ahead of him, Richardson followed Latimer to the long, low-beamed sitting room.

'Ah, Peter!' Stocker took the pipe from his mouth and held out his other hand in welcome—a friendly gesture which somehow seemed as insincere as a whore's smile, at least in this setting; Stocker was another one with not so much breeding as brains, or he wouldn't have tried to welcome one man at another man's hearth. Nevertheless, there was a good, tough peasant streak under this ersatz behavior, which made him a man to reckon with, as well as an acceptable boss.

'Hullo, sir.' Richardson decided to keep things as casual as possible, if only to give Oliver St. John Latimer less