gratification. But the cold question was unavoidable.
dummy2
'Where's David and his missus?'
'As far as I know, they're both in Rome at this moment,'
replied Stocker, eyeing him unblinkingly.
'Oh . . .' He couldn't quite keep the relief out of his breath.
'. . . then what are all the bluebottles for? I was beginning to think there'd been a death in the family.'
'There's been a death right enough. A burglar was shot dead here last night.'
Richardson stared at him, his brain adjusting to the information and amending it. Not a burglar, that was for sure
—not a burglar. For whatever Brigadier Thomas Stocker and Master Oliver St. John Latimer were interested in, it wasn't dead burglars.
'Who was he?'
'The burglar? We don't know.'
It hardly needed amplifying: the sort of person who broke into David Audley's home and interested Stocker and Latimer wouldn't be carrying his home address and next of kin.
'We're working on it though,' continued Stocker. 'We don't have his—a—face to go on, but his prints are undamaged.'
'He got it in the face?'
Stocker nodded.
'From whom? Who shot him?'
'David's handyman or gardener, I'm not quite sure which he dummy2
is.'
'Old Charlie?'
'That's right. Charles Clark. It seems he thought some young hooligans had broken in—they seem to have been causing trouble round here—at least that's what his wife said at first.
But we haven't been able to get a coherent word out of him so far.'
Charlie was big and slow—slow in mind and body. Yet he was also slow to anger, not the sort to shoot first and ask second.
'You're quite sure it was Charlie?'
'Not the least doubt about it. His wife had gone to fetch the village policeman—they found him sitting at the foot of the stairs crying his heart out, with his shotgun across his knees.
And on the top of the landing there was this chap with half his head blown off.'
He paused, chewing at his pipe, but Richardson waited: there had to be more to it than this.
Stocker shrugged. 'Actually we're pretty sure it was pure self-defence. The fellow on the landing shot at Clark—cut his ear with the bullet. There's a bullet hole in the newel post, which would have been just by his head. And of course we found the chap's gun at the bottom of the stairs near Clark. It must have fallen there, because he hadn't touched it. American Army Colt, standard issue—one round fired.
Richardson frowned. That figured well enough: Charlie had reacted instinctively, though faster obviously than anyone dummy2
who knew him would have expected. But that wasn't of any real interest. What mattered was that David's home had been raided by someone quite prepared to shoot it out with anyone who disturbed him, and that ruled out both the pro burglars and the juvenile scum. Steeple Horley was still light years away from New York in that, as in other things.
Also, it wasn't the first time that David had had uninvited visitors, he remembered suddenly: in fact that MVD chappie
—Guriev?—had been given the bum's rush from Britain for that, among several other incivilities.
And that, in turn, might account for Stocker's speedy arrival, for the Old House must by now be in the special Red Book the police had of people and places whose well-being was of interest and importance to security. A gunfight and a dead man in a Red Book house would set all the wires humming to Whitehall.
'Do we have any idea what he was after? Had David got something juicy locked up in that safe of his?'
'Dr. Audley had no classified material at home,' Latimer murmured in a plummy, self-satisfied voice. 'He wasn't working on a classified sector.'
Richardson flicked a contemptuous look at Latimer. 'I seem to remember David has a way of catching sharks other people let through the safety nets,' he said coolly. 'What does David have to say about it, anyway?'
There was a second's silence—a silence prolonged just one dummy2
cold fraction longer than natural, so that it sank down through every layer of Richardson's consciousness until it came to rest in the pit of his stomach.
Too many policemen. Too many policemen and not a word in the morning paper he had read in the plane, or on the radio news. And now Stacker looking solemn and Oliver St. John Latimer looking smug enough to make a chap throw up his Aer Lingus breakfast on to the nearest Persian rug. And neither of them looking at each other— both of them looking at him. . . .
