Weston turned back to him. 'How much d'you know about these Double R people?'
'Not a lot yet.' Audley returned the look candidly. 'But I think at the moment I'd rather like to avoid jumping to conclusions. Which is pretty much the answer to my question, I suspect: you didn't just want an inside man—a spy. Would that be about the size of things?'
'That's very good. Dr. Audley. You're absolutely right.
Crime's one thing and prejudice is another, and the copper who mixes them up only makes trouble for himself. My business is crime.'
'You had a prejudice against them?'
'Not to start with. It was more like curiosity.
'Professional curiosity?'
'Indirectly, I read about one of these battles they staged, when there were a dozen people carted off to hospital. And it occurred to me if that had been a football match I'd have thought 'Aye aye—the local yobbos are getting out of hand'.
So I went to have a look at one of their shows for myself, unofficially.'
'And—?'
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'Well, they differ, of course. The Sealed Knot—pretty respectable ... the King's Army—lots of beer and good fellowship. Both keen on their history. Discipline not bad really. Safety regulations . . . well, improving, let's say.'
'Safety regulations? So there's an element of danger—but if they cart people off to hospital obviously there is. Silly question.'
'Not so silly. Before I read that newspaper report I'd assumed their battles were glorified pageants—cream puffs at five yards sort of thing. And after I'd seen one . . . well, I must say I was surprised by what I saw.
'I suppose the size of the battle plays a part in it. Sometimes there are only three or four dozen putting on a parade and a bit of old-fashioned drill at a fete—'Shoulder Your Pikes' and
'Advance Your Pikes', that sort of thing. But the first big fight I saw the Double R people stage, down in the west of the county it was . . . there were six or seven hundred of them, and it wasn't cream-puffs at five yards at all—it was pretty brutal. They really went at each other.'
'Undisciplined, you mean?'
'No, they were disciplined all right. Just like the others. They keep together in their regiments, as they call them. And they charge each other in their regiments too, I can tell you.'
'Like a rugger scrum?' Audley tried without success to envisage a rugger scrum in seventeenth-century battledress, with three hundred a side. 'But they're carrying pikes, aren't dummy5
they . . . ?'
'And swords. And there are musketeers.' Weston nodded.
'They charge each other with pikes . . . Christ! I can see that would be dangerous. It's a wonder there aren't more hurt!'
'Yes . . . but at the last moment they port their pikes—hold them up diagonally across their bodies—and then smack into each other.'
Weston slapped his open hands together graphically. 'And then they push like buggery until one side gives up. Or their officers break it off.' Weston stopped suddenly. 'But you say you don't want to hear this sort of detail yet?'
'Oh, I don't mind the technicalities.' Audley glanced at Weston, unwilling to probe too obviously. What he wanted must be given freely or not at all, that was the essence of it.
'But what I still don't quite understand is why all this interested you. . . . That is, after you'd seen it. . . . I mean, so they were playing soldiers— maybe a little roughly. But that's all it amounts to: playing soldiers. The Americans have been playing their Civil War for years. And now they're busy playing the War of Independence. If you don't force people to wear uniforms they'll put them on of their own accord. At least, some people will. And so long as it's historical —so long as it isn't para-military. . . . You're not suggesting the Double R Society is para- military in seventeenth-century drag, are you?'
Weston stared at him in silence for a moment. 'No, not dummy5
exactly para-military.'
'What then?'
Again Weston said nothing for a few seconds. Then he shook his head doubtfully. 'If I tell you I'll be helping you to jump to conclusions, that's for sure.'
Audley shook his head. 'I'm rather afraid I've already been helped to this one, so the damage is already done. But I'd be interested to find out whether it's the same one—and I'll make allowances for your prejudices, Superintendent.' He smiled the sting out of the words. 'So you went on the lookout for—ah—yobbos having a licensed punch-up. And you found . . . something more interesting, maybe?'
Weston pursed his lips. 'To be honest, Dr. Audley, I'm not at all sure what I found—not yet, anyway.' He paused, as though unwilling to commit himself. 'Just let's say as a policeman I'm prejudiced against . . . politics.'
So there it was, thought Audley: the confirmation of what Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon had encountered, passed on with all the caution and non-partisanship of the man in the middle, the good copper. There was an irony there which neither of the extremes could stomach, and against which they therefore blinkered themselves: to the far left Weston was a Fascist pig marked for the lamp-post, and to the far right a potential tool to be flattered and used; whereas in reality Weston's breed regarded both sides with equal contempt as it protected each from the excesses of the other.
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