Frances frowned at him. 'What did you mean - 'Colonel Butler may have a substitute'?'
'I think so. He's about to catch that fellow O'Leary - he thinks he's going to catch him alive, but David believes otherwise.' He looked at her, eyes bright with excitement which he probably hadn't felt for years, thought Frances - maybe since he had sprinted across his Normandy beach. Teaching students English literature for half a lifetime would be no substitute for that drug, at a guess.
'You know a lot that's going on. Professor?' 'That I shouldn't, you mean?' He twinkled again happily. 'Well, you started it, my dear... Or you started it again, I should say. I was half in your line of business after the war, but they were making such a fearful mess of it that I got out of it as soon as I decently could, before I was too old to do anything else. That would be about the time Jones did the same thing - R. V. Jones ...
though I wasn't in his class, of course.... Helping to win a war is one thing - it's rather stimulating, actually. But losing a peace can be intolerably frustrating.' He regarded her mildly. 'I've kept in touch to some extent, but I'm really no more than an interested spectator.'
Frances counted up to ten, for the sake of good manners. 'Colonel Butler is going to catch O'Leary?'
'That is my impression. You seem surprised?' She didn't know how to answer that.
For some reason she was surprised: the reason lay in the atmosphere of ants' nest disaster she had left behind her here only forty-eight hours earlier. Yet even then.
Colonel Butler had been in the middle of the nest, but not part of its confusion, she remembered.
'He is a man with great drive and will-power, your Colonel Butler.' The spectator's detachment
was evident. 'And, what is rarer with that conjunction, of some intellect, I fancy -
though he is at pains to conceal it under a khaki manner.' Crowe contemplated Colonel Butler's virtue for a moment. 'So ... we have had much excitement here, these last twenty-four hours. Already one of my staff in the Library has been detained. And one of our post-graduate students is ... helping the police with their inquiries, as the saying goes.'
Frances frowned with the effort of recollection. There had been Dixon and ... and Collins. And Penrose and Brunton - Brunton the Great American Novel seeker, who had been unveiling his girlfriend when the Minister was scheduled to unveil the new Library. And if that, in retrospect, was too good an alibi to be true, she would have staked her reputation on both Collins and Dixon.
'Now you
Frances stiffened. As she swivelled in the direction of the Professor's look her bare shoulder reminded her of her relative state of undress, and of Marilyn's appalling hair, but there was nothing she could do about her appearance.
'The whole bloody battle can be irrelevant,' said David Audley. 'Battle of New Orleans - January, 1815. Peace Treaty of Ghent - December, 1814. Everything's a matter of communication. Or lack of communication, in this instance.' He acknowledged Frances with an incurious blink, without a second glance. She might just as well have been stark naked, or dressed as a nun, for all he cared, the blink indicated. 'Hullo, Frances.'
Come to that, he looked decidedly rough himself, Frances noted. The good suit was creased and rumpled, the shirt was well into its second day, and the unspeakable Rugby Club tie - thin magenta and green stripes on yellow, ugh! - revealed his top shirt button, which was undone, even though the tie itself was savagely pulled into a tiny knot. He hadn't shaved either, and altogether he didn't look like a would-be emperor, even of a dying empire.
'They've both gone hunting with Jack Butler, Hugo. The whole damn place is crawling with Special Branch - it's like the Fuhrer's bunker, the Science Block, there's no way I can get into it. I was able to talk to Jock Maitland for a moment or two, thank God
- he can be trusted to hold his tongue if no one asks him any questions, but he didn't know much. How the hell Jack bamboozled the University into installing all that equipment, I'll never know.'
'Money, dear boy. Your people stopped their mouths with gold, it never fails; Applied Science is king at the moment, and they've been offered all sorts of grants to turn a blind eye to it. Besides which your Jack can be very charming, you know.'
'I don't know - not with me, he isn't!' said Audley feelingly. 'The long and short of it is ... I don't know what the hell's going on out there, anyway, Hugo. Except that Jack's busy routing out an old KGB contact of his somewhere.'
'They are about to ensnare O'Leary - I told you, dear boy,' said Crowe.
'Not alive, they won't. The information they've got is false - he may be regular KGB, but he's not Russian either - he's Irish. And I had that from those Irish madmen in the CIA. He's a bloody kamikaze pilot, that's what he is.'
'So you said,' murmured Crowe mildly. 'So they will kill him.'
'That's not what I'm afraid of - ' Audley caught himself up short and looked at Frances. 'Bad manners. I'm sorry, Frances. I've got a headache. And part of a hangover ...
which has been dosed by a crazy pilot in the United States Air Force with an old Indian recipe of his, so the part of me that isn't hung-over now feels as if it's been bitten by a rattlesnake.... On top of which I've got jet-lag, and I don't know whether it's Monday or Christmas. It feels like Monday.'
'It's Friday,' said Frances. That was one thing she really did know. 'Friday, the eleventh of November. In the afternoon. Hullo, David - good afternoon.'
'And good afternoon to you, Frances. Although it isn't.' He removed his rain-smeared spectacles, wiped them with a grubby handkerchief, put them back on, and stared at her out of eyes like blood-oranges. 'Why, incidentally, are you partially unclothed?'
'She got wet, dear boy,' said Crowe. 'Like you.'
'Eh?' Audley looked down at his jacket: 'I see - yes. It's raining, isn't it!' He brushed ineffectually at his
