The only treatment for gangrene was amputation.
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Reconnaissance:
I
'MR Cox?' inquired a voice, disembodied and slightly metallic, but also recognizably female.
Roche looked round the lift for some evidence of a microphone, and found nothing. There weren't even any controls: Cox had simply ushered him into the blank box, and the doors had closed behind them, and the lift had shuddered and moved upwards. Or downwards, as the case might be, for all the directional feeling he had experienced—
downwards would have been more appropriate. Not down to a particular floor, but down to a
'And Captain Roche,' replied Cox, to no one in particular, unperturbed by the absence of anything into which the reply could be addressed. 'Captain Roche's appointment is timed for eleven-hundred hours, madam.'
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The Ninth Circle was reserved respectively for traitors to their lords, their guests, their country and their kindred, but Roche couldn't remember in which order the levels were disposed, down to the great bottomless frozen lake far beneath the fires of Hell. But it did occur to him that—strictly speaking—he was now for the first time in a sort of limbo between all the circles and levels, since he was at last absolutely open-minded on the subject of betrayal: he was prepared to betray either side, as the occasion and the advantage offered.
The lift shuddered again, and the doors slid open abruptly.
Roche was confronted by a sharp-faced woman of indeterminate age in prison-grey and pearls, against a backdrop of London roofscape.
'Captain Roche—I-am-so-sorry-you've-been-delayed-like-this,' the woman greeted him insincerely. 'Have you the documentation, Mr Cox?'
Cox, apparently struck dumb with awe at this apparition, offered her the blue card with Roche's photograph on it which he had collected, with Roche, from the porter in the entrance kiosk.
The woman compared Roche with his photograph, and clearly found the comparison unsatisfactory.
'This is supposed to be you, is it?' she admonished Roche, as though it was his fault that the photographer had failed.
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Roche was at a loss to think of any other way that he could prove he was himself when she abruptly reversed the card for him to see. It certainly didn't look like him, this fresh-faced subaltern—not like the wary (if not shifty) Roche who faced him in the shaving-mirror each morning.
He took another look at the picture. This was undoubtedly the Tokyo picture of 2/Lt (T/Capt) Roche. And, true enough, this Roche had been just twenty-one years of age, while looking all of eighteen, and the shaving-mirror Roche of this morning, six years of treason on, didn't look a day under forty.
He grinned at her uncertainly. 'I was a lot younger then—
Korean War, and all that... 'A Roche by any other face', you might say, Miss—Mrs—?' He floundered deliberately, trying to take the war into her territory.
'Mrs Harlin, Captain Roche.' She expelled the invader with a frown. 'A Roche by any other face?'
He struggled to keep the grin in its trenches. 'A joke, Mrs . . .
Harlin.
'Indeed?' Mrs Harlin had met jokers before, and their bones were whitening on the wire of her forward defences. 'This photograph needs updating, Captain Roche.'
Cox, shamed at last by the massacre of the innocent, coughed dummy5
politely by way of a diversion. 'Do you wish me to remain, madam? Or will you ring for me?' he asked her humbly, without looking at Roche.
'Just do what the book says, Mr Cox.'
'Thank you, madam,' said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.
'Captain Roche, Sir Eustace,' said Mrs Harlin.
Sir Eustace—Mr Avery that was, of the RIP sub-committee—
