'—doesn't look as though he fitted in awfully well there, but he did his time.'
No remission for good behaviour?'
'What?'
'They kept him on right to the end—October '46. And the university term starts in October. I seem to recall chaps getting special release in my day,' said Roche politely, to make up for his lapse into facetiousness.
'Nothing unusual about that, if he was on a job. His fitness assessments were pretty damning, certainly—looks like dummy5
maybe someone had it in for him for something he'd done.'
'You don't know what he'd done—what he'd been doing?'
'Yes . . . that is, no.' Stocker shook his head. 'I put in a request on a 'Need to Know' basis, but it was denied. I was told that it wasn't relevant.'
'Is that unusual, in your experience?'
'Oh yes—quite usual. They hold on to that sort of thing as long as they can, as a matter of course. But in this case Colonel Clinton also turned down my request. He said there was no need for me to know.'
'You went to Clinton after your request had been denied?'
'Naturally.' Stocker regarded him candidly. 'I never take the first no as the final answer .... But, at any rate, Audley made up for all that at university—he's bright, no doubt about that.
Not popular, but very bright. Good at games . . . rugger mostly, almost first-class at that, but not quite. Club level—
helped to found a local club on his home territory—funny name—'
'The Visigoths.'
'That's right—it's in the file ... they won the Wessex League in '54 ... and the usual squash and fives, at college level, nothing special.'
'Clubbable, in fact?' Audley did seem a depressingly normal public school product—school, regiment, university, work-and-games,
dummy5
Stocker was looking at him, and Stocker hadn't answered.
Perhaps he hadn't heard?
'Clubbable?' Perhaps Stocker was unacquainted with the word.
'Joins in, plays the game, and all that?'
'Yes.' Stocker continued to look at him. 'Yes and no.'
'What d'you mean—'yes and no'?'
Stocker considered his contradictory answer. 'I rather think I mean 'no', actually.'
Roche waited for the Major to elaborate the contradiction.
'You know ... we don't know where his money comes from?'
Stocker went off at a surprising tangent.
'The file said 'private means',' said Roche, deciding not to press the Major on that 'yes-and-no-meaning-no' on the assumption that he would come back to it in his own good time.
'Yes—that's what they are—
'They're so damn private we don't know what they are, or where they are, or where they come from.'
Audley was living in France at the moment, in the south near Cahors. But before that he had been on the move constantly, through Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and even in the Middle East, only returning to England at carefully spaced tax-evasive intervals. And while it wasn't the sort of life-style that necessarily needed vast resources, its funding could be dummy5
made very difficult to check, and with only a little ingenuity too.
'He's officially domiciled in Switzerland,' continued Stocker.
'But I've half an idea the money is in Lebanon. The difficulty is that Colonel Clinton doesn't want him alerted that anyone is sniffing around, so we're having to move very slowly. So slowly as to be practically stationary.'
Roche frowned. 'But I thought his money was inherited?
Wasn't his father well off?'
Stocker shook his head. 'Just a facade. Or ... there must have been money there at some time, but by the time the father was killed early in the war it had nearly all gone. The flat in London went in '39, and most of the land had already been sold by then. There was the house ... it isn't so big actually, but it's very old and it is rather nice . . . but even that was in a very poor state of repair, and the father was dickering to sell that too. He was posted to France just as he was about to sign on the dotted line.'
That was in 1940?'
'That's right. He was killed just before Dunkirk.'
And the mother died before that.'
