get them what they want.'
What they want.
'So now I think you'd better tell me about this man Audley,'
dummy5
said Genghis Khan.
III
'No, ROCHE, I cannot tell you anything about this fellow Audley that isn't in the file,' said Major Stocker brusquely.
'What I know is in the file.'
Major Stocker wore a Royal Artillery tie beneath a face which was weathered like a block of Blenheim stone cruelly exposed to the elements over several centuries.
'What I know is in the file,' repeated Major Stocker, as though to pre-empt any feeble Roche-protest, 'because I compiled the file.'
And Major Stocker also frightened Roche in the same way as Colonel Clinton had done; perhaps not quite so much, allowing for rank, but almost as much because—according to Genghis Khan's informed guess—he was Clinton's creature, and had therefore been quarried from the same hard strata.
Yet, nevertheless, he didn't frighten Roche quite as much as Genghis Khan had done, and that made all the difference.
'But there must be something—'
'Of course there's something, man!' They had had two minutes together, but already Stocker had no time for Roche, that was plain: Captain Roche in Major Stocker's battery would have led a dog's life. 'That's why you're here, damn it!'
'I mean, something you know that isn't in the file—about dummy5
what sort of man he is—damn it!' Fear hardened Roche into resistance.
What sort of man he is: David
Oliver St.John Latimer didn't like David Longsdon Audley—
had never met him, had never sat the same exams, had never packed down in the same scrum (the idea of Oliver St.John Latimer stripe-jerseyed for a game of rugger was beyond imagination), never eaten in the same mess (the idea of Oliver St.John Latimer crammed into the same tank was equally beyond imagination)—but Oliver St.John Latimer didn't like David Longsdon Audley, and that was a fact if not a fact in the file. Because he'd said so. 'He's a tricky blighter, if you ask me,' said Oliver St.John Latimer, eyeing Sir Eustace Avery coolly, equal to equal, and then David Roche pityingly, superior to inferior.
'Latimer is one of the new recruits,' said Genghis Khan.
'Eton, then Merton College and All Souls at Oxford—a very gifted young man—we would like to know very much how they recruited him . . . perhaps also a very nasty young man . . .')
'A tricky blighter, then,' said Latimer. 'Arrogant, selfish, indisciplined, bloody-minded, ruthless, cunning—take your pick.' He stared into space as he listed David Longsdon dummy5
Audley's virtues, at a point above Roche's head.
'Brilliant,' supplemented Sir Eustace. 'Brave.'
Roche achieved a surreptitious sidelong look at Colonel Clinton, and was rewarded with a fleeting vision of Clinton observing Oliver St.John Latimer in an unguarded moment.
'Clever—I'll grant you clever,' begrudged Latimer.
'A First at Cambridge,' murmured Sir Eustace. 'An Open Scholarship when he was seventeen—the Hebden Prize—and a First after the war.'
'Anyone can get a First at Cambridge,' said Latimer disparagingly. 'It isn't difficult.'
'And a doctorate,' said Sir Eustace.
Latimer sniffed. 'On a singularly obscure aspect of Byzantine religious history. Which I also strongly suspect he cribbed from an even more obscure untranslated Arabic thesis on the subject ... I know of a chap who did exactly the same with a Ph.D on Richard Hooker— all out of an untranslated German book . . .But — clever, I'll grant you, yes!'
dummy5
'And brave.' Sir Eustace allowed the hint of a sharper edge into his voice, almost as though he was deliberately taking a cut at Latimer.
'Ah . . . well, I wouldn't like to set myself up as an authority there, Eustace,' said Latimer off-handedly, as impervious to the cut as a rhinoceros to the brush of a thornbush. 'They didn't give him any pretty ribbons, but that doesn't prove anything, I suppose — medals being no more than a lottery.
But no doubt a gallant officer.'
