'Ah, well I'm told things have hotted up now. It's rescheduled for peak viewing on BBC One. They've got a Cambridge Don by the name of Nayler as link man.' Mitchell looked sidelong at Audley. 'You wouldn't know him by any chance, David?'
Too casual by half, that question.
'He was up at the same time as I was.'
And too casual by half, that reply, damn him!
'I rather thought so.'
'Have you spoken to him, then?'
'Have I spoken to him?' Mitchell's lip curled and suddenly he was all seventeenth-century again. 'Professor Bloody Nayler was my tutor for one brief —mercifully brief—period.
Even if I crawled to him—which I don't intend to do—he wouldn't give me the time of day.' Amusement slowly displaced cold anger. 'I'm relieved to see that you dislike him as much as I do. But why the hell didn't you drown him in the Cam when he was a puppy?'
'Get to the point, Paul.'
'The point?' The glint of amusement went off abruptly. 'The point is that other people dislike him equally. So a girl I know in the BBC was quite happy to show me his draft script—and talk about what's not in it yet.'
'And what is ... not in it?'
Mitchell sat forward. 'Nobody knows— yet. But Ratcliffe and Nayler have cooked up a deal between them, that's for dummy5
certain. What's in the script at the moment is their joint version of how the gold got to Standingham—Nayler's constructed most of that and Ratcliffe is going to give him the credit for being a clever fellow. But that's all just scene-setting for the big stuff, which is going to be filmed
'But surely they know what happened during the siege—and at the storming?' said Frances. 'I mean, I've heard people talking about it in camp already.'
'They know the facts about the siege and the storming, sure.
But not about the gold and how it was hidden.' Mitchell swung back to Audley quickly. 'It wasn't hidden in the house, that they do know. It was out in the grounds somewhere, apparently right out in the open. And he did go straight to it, like the papers say; he dug pretty deep before he hit on it, according to information received. The place was like a ploughed field when he'd finished.'
Audley nodded. 'But how does all this help us?'
'It doesn't, at least not yet. But my little BBC girl had one very interesting bit of scuttlebutt—in fact she thinks she dummy5
knows how Charlie got on to the gold. Or at least how he was so sure it was there when everyone else said no. Because she did the routine research on Charlie himself— there's going to be some scene-setting stuff about his Maoist-Leninist revolutionary background, he's insisted on that. This is gold for the people, is his line—not gold for Charlie Ratcliffe. And he's going to spend it in the service of the people.'
'Well, it makes a change from booze and women and fast cars,' conceded Frances. 'Except the people to Charlie are likely to be revolutionary people, I suppose. The Marxist heavenly host.'
'Too right! But the point is that one bit of Charlie's background has been edited out of the record, ostensibly by Nayler because the script was running too long. But my girl says Nayler passed it and Charlie cut it out himself. And it's the exact bit of Charlie's past I've been looking for all along—
the moment when he first met his long-lost ancestor Nathaniel Parrott. Which was a case of like meeting like, I suspect; there's no surviving portrait of Nathaniel, but if there was I've a hunch it'd be a dead ringer of Charlie Ratcliffe looking down on us.'
That was very possible, thought Audley. Families erupted with genius, and then slept for centuries, as the Churchills had done between the first Duke and the appearance of Jenny's Randolph and her young Winston; no doubt they could do the same with the more uncomfortable qualities shared by Nathaniel Parrott and Charles Neville Steyning-dummy5
Ratcliffe.
'I don't know what you're driving at now, Paul,' said Frances.
'No?' Mitchell glanced quickly at Audley. 'You disappoint me, Frances.'
It wasn't Frances who disappointed him, of course: it was that he had failed to get the same response from teacher.
With someone less self-confident than Mitchell a bit of that sort of encouragement might have been in order, but it would do no harm to let him see that he'd have to get up earlier in the morning to catch David Audley in bed.
'What he's driving at is that Charlie Ratcliffe's interest in his ancestral treasure —and in the English Civil War— is of rather more recent vintage than he suggested to the Press. Is that it, Paul?'
'More or less.' Mitchell nodded cheerfully enough. 'It's all in the Ratcliffe file, Frances—David's quite right, it's not much of a dossier, but it does have a few facts. Including that he didn't join the Double R Society until about a year ago. And, come to that, he didn't read history at college either, it was sociology.'
'Surprise, surprise,' murmured Frances.
'No surprise, I agree. But it all adds up to a little terminological inexactitude—he was lying through his
