Our man in Camelot

'I guess you don't know your own strength, Doc. You caved in the side of his skull like an eggshell.'

Mosby gave an uncontrollable shiver.

'Come on, Doc,' said Harry Finsterwald gently, 'we couldn't help ourselves, you know that. These guys, they weren't going to just kick my ass and send me home—remember how Davies got it. You hadn't shown up, I'd 'uv gotten a piece of the same, you better believe it. So we just evened the score, is all.' He paused and looked around him, frowning. 'But what we have to do now is get them out of sight, and quick.'

Mosby came back to immediate reality abruptly. This was neither the time nor the setting for conscience pangs: no matter it was a graveyard, it was no place to be caught squatting beside the brand-new corpses of their victims. Any moment now the vicar—or maybe the entire Mothers' Union—might come trotting up the path to the church, and then they'd have a fully-grown international incident on their hands as well as a glitched mission.

He stood up quickly, ripping the dog-collar from his neck and stuffing it into his coat pocket together with the spectacles. Apart from the bodies and the broken banner midway between them the scene was as peaceful as before; the insects still buzzed and even the blackbirds were back, squabbling among themselves near the overgrown south-east corner. Their outrageous luck was still holding.

'I can get the car up here and stash them in the trunk,' said Finsterwald. 'Once I've gotten them back on base I can handle them. But we got to get them out of sight first.'

Mosby was aware that he was being jollied out of shock and into action. Maybe Harry Finsterwald wasn't so bad after all when it came to the crunch—maybe he was starting to repay the debt he owed Mosby for the preservation of his skin. Or perhaps he himself was naturally trying to see the best side of the skin he'd saved.

None of which mattered, compared with the need to tidy up St Swithun's Churchyard.

He pointed towards the south-east corner, where ecology had produced a fine crop of shoulder high nettles.

'Over there,' he said. The 'Do not disturb' request on the notice should keep the dead men private for long enough, and if ecology implied survival of the fittest as well as the natural chain of living and dying they wouldn't be too out of place there anyway.

Finsterwald nodded. 'Okay. You take the feet, Doc.'

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

VIII

SHIRLEY LOOKED ONLY briefly at Mosby before dumping her bag and pile of parcels on her bed.

'Take your dirty shoes off the quilt, honey—you're not at home now.'

Mosby eased his shoes off with his toes and raised himself slightly in order to get a better view of things to come.

'Harry give you a bad time?' She stripped off her dress and seated herself at the dressing table.

'Harry's not so bad.'

'He's not?' She examined her face in the mirror. 'You mean he came up with something on Bullitt?'

'One or two things.'

'Uh-huh?' She examined her face carefully in the mirror. 'So you had an easy time… Well, I didn't…

That town sure doesn't welcome the motorist. It may be beautiful, but it's an awful place to park a car in, and that's the truth. We had to walk miles.'

'You get to see it better that way.'

'Which wasn't exactly the object of the operation… I look a wreck.'

Not from where I'm lying, thought Mosby, marvelling at the sexiness of her back. He had seen it a good many times before, since the strip-off and make-up routine was her standard procedure, and it wasn't the first female back he had ever seen. But there was something about Shirley's back, even down to the slight bulges of flesh which the bra straps pressed up when she lent forward, that never ceased to arouse him. It was just one hell of a sexy back.

And now he was enormously relieved to find that it still aroused him. It signified that he was back to normal again; it was like flexing the fingers on an injured hand and knowing from their movement that no permanent damage had been done. He had killed a man, but Shirley still had a sexy back.

Crouching beside the two bodies among the nettles, waiting for Harry to bring his car up alongside the nearby wall, he had had one long moment of doubt about that. The feeling of shock had passed surprisingly quickly, and Harry's common sense had given panic no time to develop. Plus the certain knowledge that he hadn't meant to hit so hard—even that maybe he hadn't hit so hard. It had been the brass knob on the end of the shaft which had done the mischief, he had found it on the broken end with the tell-tale blood bright on it. If Thickset hadn't taken that fatal step back—

And then the little pale yellow butterfly had settled on Thickset's open palm—the nettles were alive with pale yellow butterflies—and he had realised that all his explanations were mere excuses. Old wives' tales said that butterflies lived just one single day, but the little butterfly was better off than Thickset.

Intention, or accident, or plain bad luck didn't make a damn of difference: the man was dead and he had killed him.

Shirley had stopped looking at herself in the mirror and was looking at him in it.

'You feeling okay, Mose?'

'I'm feeling fine.'

'You look rather pale.'

'I tell you I'm feeling great. But you could make me feel a lot better very easily, you know.'