War Game

the man to prove it.'

'Why not?'

'I've told you. First, it's not my skill. Finding enough proof to convince twelve good men and true isn't something I've ever had to do, I wouldn't know where to start, never mind finish.

'And second, it's a police job. It is their skill—they know how to do it, and they're damn good at it, too. If it can be done, they'll do it—and if they can't do it then I can't do it.' He stared hard at the Minister. 'And since you're here now I must assume that they can't.'

The Minister relaxed, with just the ghost of a smile edging his mouth. 'A fair assumption. But you haven't taken your logic quite far enough.' The smile grew. 'And that is your skill, I gather.'

It was an open invitation to go straight to the heart of the matter, thought Audley. But for some reason the Minister was unwilling to spell it out, but wanted Audley himself to deduce it.

He stared out of the car window at the crab-apple tree in the hedgerow. There was a crab like that in the spinney behind his own kitchen garden wall at home, and like this one it was dummy5

laden with fruit. The late frost and the bullfinches had played havoc with his carefully tended Blenheims and Cox's Orange Pippins, but the devil himself looked after the crab-apples.

And if what the Minister said was true then it looked as if the devil had kept a friendly eye on Charlie Ratcliffe too.

So they were morally certain that Charlie Ratcliffe was the killer, or at least the killer's paymaster, but they couldn't prove it. But that had happened before and would happen again: there were some you won and some you lost, and there was no use weeping about it. Those were the ones you notched up to experience, hoping that the Lord of the Old Testament would keep His promise about repayment in His own time.

But Ministers of the Crown had no time to worry about such things in any case. Murderers caught and murderers free could only be statistics to them. All murderers were equal before the law.

Even revolutionary murderers.

Audley looked back at the Minister as innocently as he could.

'Tell me about Charlie Ratcliffe, Minister. I'm afraid I'm not very well up in revolution at the moment.'

Stocker fished a yellow folder out of his brief-case. 'Charlie Ratcliffe, David,' he said.

Audley accepted the folder. It was crisp and new, like the typescript within it.

Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe.

dummy5

Interesting, that. Despite battle and murder, and Puritan revolutions and Royalist restoration, and Protestant revolution and Hanoverian succession, and industrial revolution and democratic succession, and the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars and the rise and fall of the Labour Party and Trades Union succession . . . despite all that there was still a Steyning in possession of Standingham Castle after over three centuries of accelerating social change.

They must be a shrewd, tough line, the Steynings.

The Steyning-Ratcliffes.

Charlie Ratcliffe.

He felt the smooth, thick paper under his fingers. That was interesting too—if anything even more interesting. Not Department paper and not a departmental typewriter. Not a photocopy from the Special Records or a typist's copy of a print-out from the Central Computer. But, for a bet, if he now called for a photocopy on a print-out from anywhere else, then this would be what he would get.

Well, they had been careless—

Born April 23, 1949—

A mere baby, relatively speaking.

—careless. Which was all the more reason why he must not be careless in his turn and ask them the direct question that was on the tip of his tongue: what had there been in the original file on Charles Neville Steyning- Ratcliffe that wasn't dummy5

fit for David Audley's eyes?

Much better to hold on to that question. So long as it remained unanswered there would be an area of uncertainty.

But there were ways and means of dealing with that, and as long as it remained officially unasked he had a nice little excuse with which to account for future failure.

Educated at—

He read the typed pages through carefully. Until the last one they contained nothing of unique, or even very special, interest; Charlie Ratcliffe was no different from his fellow activists among the privileged youth of the West, from the Berlin Wall to the Golden Gate, the product and victim of his age.

Born a century earlier he might have carried the flag or the Gospel into darkest Africa. Born fifty years later—or twenty-five years after that—he might just have managed to get his name on the village war memorial, with the lost generations of First World War subalterns and Second World War bomber crews.

But Born April 23, 1949 he had become the founder and editor of The Red Rat, which appeared to advocate an odd mixture of perfect peace and bloody revolution, in which all men not hanging from lamp-posts were brothers.

'Well . . .' he closed the folder and met the Minister's stare again '... I would have thought you'd have done better to enlist a good team of sharp lawyers rather than me, dummy5

Minister.'