'Routine fiddlesticks,' said Shirley. 'And she wanted to know more about Di Davies than about you, Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
honey.'
'And were you able to satisfy her, Mrs Sheldon?' asked Audley.
'Seeing as how I hardly knew the man, the whole thing was a waste of time. He was my husband's friend, not mine.'
Audley looked towards Mrs Fitzgibbon. 'Well, Frances?'
'I agree… Except I'd go further: I very much doubt that Mrs Sheldon ever met Major Davies, beyond perhaps saying 'good morning' to him.'
'That's ridiculous!' snapped Shirley.
'She knows her cover story perfectly,' continued Frances Fitzgibbon. 'She is extremely resourceful in blocking questions beyond it. I would think it unlikely that anything she has told me will conflict seriously with what her husband may have told you. Not so far, anyway— But I don't think the story would stand up to separate in-depth interrogation. Either they didn't have time to put it together in total detail, or they never expected it to be professionally tested.'
'Or they are amateurs,' said Audley.
Frances Fitzgibbon considered Shirley for a moment. 'If she is, she's a natural.'
Mosby could feel the water-tight bulkheads beneath him giving way one after another. If he was going to save anything from this disaster, never mind Shirley's skin and his own, it would be from a lifeboat. It was time to abandon the ship.
'Is everyone going crazy?' said Shirley. 'I just don't understand what's—'
'Shut up, honey,' said Mosby in a flat voice.
'What?' she rounded on him. 'Are you going to stand there and—'
'I said 'shut up'. So shut up.' Mosby stared round him with what he hoped was the air of a defiant trapped rat. His eyes met Hugh Roskill's over a steaming teacup. 'And don't drink that tea, Squadron Leader—it'll blow your abscess through your jaw.'
Roskill lowered his cup as hurriedly as if he had smelt bitter almonds in it. 'Damnation! I'd clean forgotten.' He grinned at Mosby. 'Thanks, Sheldon.'
'Think nothing of it. I guess I'm a better dentist than I am a burglar.' He shrugged at Audley. 'I should have stuck to teeth.'
Audley nodded slowly. 'You didn't really know Davies, did you? Not as a friend.'
'Not really. I just fixed his teeth.'
Shirley drew in a sharp breath. 'Mose—what are you saying?'
'I'm letting it go, honey. It's gotten too rich for us—and too dangerous.'
'Too dangerous?'
'David says it's already killed a bunch of guys.'
'Killed?' Shirley's voice cracked. 'I don't understand.'
'Neither do I. But he's not kidding. And it wouldn't be any use to us if he was. Because he already knows where Badon is: it's under the goddamn runway at Wodden, that's where it is. Right—under—the
—goddamn—runway.'
'Runway extension,' corrected Audley.
'The runway extension.' Mosby loaded the words with bitterness and kept his eyes on Shirley. 'Davies must have talked to someone else after all.'
Shirley licked her lips. 'It can't be—you said it was a hill. Badon Hill.'
Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
'But it is a hill,' said Roskill. 'The whole of RAF Wodden is high ground: it's a plateau. And the western spur slopes up to the highest point, where the old windmill used to be—Windmill Knob, they used to call it. They demolished it in 1940, when the RAF moved in, but the foundations were still there in the grass when I was training there twelve years ago.'
But not there any more, thought Mosby with growing dismay. The whole of the western end had been thoroughly levelled, bulldozed and landscaped like a pool table, and the spoil spread far and wide into every undulation of the main ridge.
If Badon had been there—
'And you never suspected it was on the base?' Roskill sounded almost sympathetic. 'You didn't—'
'Let it be, Hugh,' said Audley. 'There's no need to probe the wound now.'
It took every bit of Mosby's self-restraint not to look at Audley in surprise. This was the exact moment to probe the wound, while it was raw and painful; and ever since the drift of Audley's new scenario had become clear he had been feverishly constructing his role in it as a greedy little interloper who had planned to cash in on accidental knowledge of the dead pilot's discovery. Yet now Audley was deliberately passing up his best chance of quizzing him.
'The only thing I would like to know,' said Audley casually, as though it was an afterthought, 'is how you acquired the Badon artefacts—just for the record.'
Mosby felt almost relieved at getting one of the key questions after all, no matter how awkward; it reassured
