Soldier No More

He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn't given up smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn't like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was always cautioning him to give up drinking, or almost, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-dummy5

Paul, only to himself; and although the new Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance . . . and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he had in mind for himself.

Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a Daily Sketch in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.

Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view—maybe art imitating reality imitating art. And it was time to find out.

He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.

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Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.

Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.

If he was wrong about the man, it didn't matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn't worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche's naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

Nothing to fear. He had told them where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that lunportant to them—or even if it wasn't—they could be relied on to oversee their security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to soldier on until they were ready to try again.

He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they dummy5

didn't make contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about Audley, David Longsdon, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—

merely annoying. So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at churches was one of his hobbies.

Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.

The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.

If they were here, then still nothing to fear. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was 'This is your big chance, David'—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else. And so it was, by God!

'Mr Roche.'

At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the dummy5

Daily Sketch reader outside.

'I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me 'Johnnie', Mr Roche—and I shall call you David.'

The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked 'Johnnie' into 'Ivan'; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol horseman riding through the man's ancestry at about the same time as this church had been built.

'Johnnie,' Roche acknowledged the identification.

'How long do we have?' The voice didn't fit the face, it was too accent-less, any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who wouldn't have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.

'About half an hour.'

'Where are you going?'

'To Guildford. I'm due to meet a man named Stocker.'

'Major Stocker?'

'That's right. You know him?'

'Why?' Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn't think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.

'He's going to brief me on this man Audley.'