'Only what's been in the papers. The Brigadier told me to lay off it until you gave the word, just to check out Swine Brook Field.' The corner of Mitchell's mouth lifted. 'But I can add two and two as well as the next man.'
'And what do you get?'
'Giving Charlie Ratcliffe a fortune is like handing a stick of gelignite to a juvenile delinquent: he's going to want to play with it one way or another, and either way something's going to get damaged.'
'A whole box of gelignite, more like,' said Frances.
So they'd done their homework, and something more. But with two like this that was to be expected.
'You want me to go down to Standingham?' asked Mitchell.
Audley shook his head. Sending someone as keen as Mitchell to Standingham was just asking for something violent to happen, and that would never do.
'Not yet. It's research for you, my lad. I want to know all there is to know about that gold of Ratcliffe's— chemical analysis, and so on. And I want to know more about the history, too. The experts all said there wasn't any gold; I want to know why he thought differently.'
dummy5
Mitchell perked up at that. 'You think somebody sparked him off?'
'At the moment I don't think anything, except my feet ache.'
Audley turned towards Frances, steadying his eyes on her face with a conscious effort. He must think of her as someone's daughter. 'I want you to concentrate on the Double R Society, Frances, remember. It's only information I want, nothing else.'
He watched them climb the gate and disappear down the track between the hedgerows.
He had laid that last bit on rather too thick, the bit about information. There wasn't anything she could get other than that, and the frown she had given him back said as much. He must try to sound more like his usual belligerent self next time.
He began to descend the hillside.
At one time or another he had walked across quite a few battlefields, he reflected, and many of them had featured ridges not unlike this one: Vimy and Waterloo, Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and Senlac Ridge at Hastings, Hameau Ridge on the Somme where he had first got to know the real Paul Mitchell. . . . One of his ancestors had even died on a ridge at Salamanca, riding at General Le Marchant's side.
Of course this ridge was small beer compared with those, but dummy5
it now shared with them the lack of any distinguishing mark which singled it out as a place where men had once buckled down to the serious business of killing each other. Just as the more recent marks of the Double R Society's mock-battle had faded, so there were no residual emanations of King Charles I and his Parliament, the Lord's Anointed and the Lord's Elected Representatives.
Or, presumably, of what had also been staged here on behalf of Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe.
He could see Superintendent Weston waiting for him.
If Cox had said Weston was a sharp fellow then he was a sharp fellow; because Cox himself, for all that he looked like a retired PT instructor, had a mind like a cut-throat razor.
So it would be better to make a friend of Weston than to try and bullshit him with the letter of introduction he carried in his pocket.
'Superintendent Weston?'
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor . . . retired PT instructor . . .
none of those, certainly. Say, a middle-aged country doctor with the authority of half a lifetime of births and deaths behind him.
'Dr. Audley.' The Superintendent advanced towards him, but the sergeant stayed back like an obedient gun- dog waiting for his signal.
dummy5
Confidence tempered by caution.
'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Superintendent.'
'That's all right, sir. It's quite nice to have an excuse to get away from my desk for an hour or two.'
Caution plus neutrality. But no overt hostility, and in Weston's place Audley knew that he would be hopping mad behind an identical facade.
'Your Chief Constable will have told you why I'm here.'
Audley paused significantly. 'It's on the instructions of the Home Secretary.'
Weston nodded slowly. 'In connection with the Ratcliffe investigation.' He matched Audley's pause, second for second. 'And you want my sergeant.'
And that, of course, was adding injury to insult: bad enough for some anonymous Home Office official to descend on a hardworking police force empowered to ask questions without the obligation of answering any in the midst of a stalled murder case, implying dissatisfaction, in high places; but to detach a useful officer from the duty rota when the force was already overstretched—all forces were overstretched—that had to be beyond the bloody limit.
Yet Weston still appeared cool enough and that was no good at all for the sort of answers that were needed. Somehow he had to be made to drop his defences. But pulling rank wouldn't achieve that any more than a straight appeal for help, which would only be despised.
dummy5
He realised suddenly that he was staring fixedly at Weston, and that Weston was returning the stare with interest. In another moment they would be in a staring match.
