shoulders.
Frances felt herself smiling. The longer David was away from his wife, the more like a tramp he became. It was hard to imagine him as the source - or, rather, to imagine his abilities and his unpopularity - as the source of all their recent troubles.
He gave up brushing. The blood-oranges came back to her again.
Frances decided to get her information in first. 'You know I'm responsible for calling you back?'
He nodded. 'I've talked to Jake Shapiro. He was at the base waiting for me, the bastard.'
But how was she going to say it? He was back, and now she didn't need him. He would roast her, and Sir Frederick would also roast her in due course. And then she would resign, and that would be that. But the inevitable outcome, which no longer worried her at all, did not solve the problem of how to break it to him now.
'No need to be scared, love.' Audley misconstrued her silence. 'You did the right thing.'
'I did?' He wasn't making it any easier.
'Fred Clinton had you figured right, as my CIA buddies would say.' Suddenly he was grim. 'Fortunately.'
She stared at him. 'What?'
'You and Mitchell between you. A perfect recipe for disobedience. Or initiative, as Horatio Nelson applied it.'
'Sir Frederick intended me to call you?'
'He surely did. He's determined to make me fight for Jack Butler, and so I will. Now he thinks I shall fight for you two as well - and so I will. But he'll never take 'no' for an answer - which is what I call a communications failure - and I won't have his job for all the tea in China. I have the same problem with that scheming bastard Jake Shapiro but at least that's understandable - Jake knows how I feel about Israel, from way back. But Clinton has let the thing become an obsession to such an extent that it's become dangerous. Now he's missing the things he should be seeing.'
'What things?'
'Ever since I put Jack Butler up for poor old Tom Stocker's job they've been giving him tough assignments - putting him in the forefront of the battle like Uriah the Hittite.
But that's fair enough - trial by ordeal will prove that God's on the Butler side as well as Audley.'
'North Yorkshire University being one of the ordeals, presumably?' murmured Crowe.
'That's what I thought, when I heard about it,' Audley nodded. 'A more diabolically stupid operation, that degree ceremony, I find it hard to imagine.' He paused. 'Too hard, in fact.'
Frances could nod to that.
'You're not suggesting that Colonel Butler was to be discredited at the cost of other people's lives, David?' Crowe sat up angrily in his spectator's chair. 'You're not serious!'
'I'm not sure what I'm suggesting any more, to be honest, Hugo. But I'm beginning to think I've been quite unusually stupid - almost as stupid as Sir Frederick Clinton. Stupid and arrogant and self-satisfied. And I'm only just in time to make amends - ' he gave Frances a little bow ' - thanks to Mrs Fitzgibbon's commonsense disobedience.'
Frances gritted her teeth. 'David, I've got something to tell you. And you're not going to like it one bit.'
He smiled at her tolerantly. 'It's okay, love - I know. They wanted you to find a reason why Jack might have wanted to kill her, and of course you found one. But it doesn't matter, not now.' 'But he didn't kill her, David.' 'Of course he didn't! The idea's plainly ridiculous - you know it, I know it. She was a selfish, scheming, cold-hearted, unloving bitch, and if ever a woman needed murdering, she did. But he hasn't got murder in him. I could have told you that in two seconds flat. And Fred should have realised it too - when they fed him the dirt it should have put him on his guard. The moment I heard about it I realised how bloody stupid I'd been.
'I mean ... it made me think about Jack himself for the first time, not about the great David Audley. Everything that's been happening to him, I thought it was because of me
- because the department's full of faceless little bastards who hate my guts. So I rather enjoyed letting Jack rub their faces in the mud - I've always enjoyed letting them hate me.'
'Yes.' Now the smile was vengeful. 'I've half a mind to take Fred's job and screw the lot of them, just for that, Hugo. Except that now I've put the whole thing together differently, and it fits much better this way.'
'What way?' Frances heard the sharp note of fear in her voice.
'I turned Fred's job down flat - they were never serious about Tom Stocker's job, they knew I wouldn't take that. But then there were all these rumours about me wanting Fred's job - no matter how often I squashed them they kept coming up again - '
Crowe stirred. 'You really don't want the top job?'
Audley scowled at him. 'Christ, Hugo - not you too!'
'I only asked, dear boy.... Are you saying that these rumours were planted deliberately - by those who knew you wouldn't accept it?'
'That's exactly what I'm saying. And I was too stupid to consider the possibility - I'm saying that too.'
'Ah - now I'm beginning to see! You thought that what was happening to Colonel Butler was directed against you. But now you believe that the rumours about you were actually calculated to stimulate opposition to his appointment? A simple reversal of the obvious, in fact?'
'More than that, Hugo.'
