Soldier No More

photo of the bespectacled Miss Palfrey on the back flap.

The book itself had fallen open at its first page—

' I, Sidonius Simplidus, Bishop of Ephesus and sometime secretary of the most illustrious lady, Galla Placidia—'

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It was not Roche's kind of book, but it reminded him strangely of other scattered novels he had picked up from the ground, on the track leading to The Old House, which fitted David Audley's tastes no better than his own. And there was another narrow strip of stiff paper that had also come adrift, which had fitted round the dustjacket: TENTH

IMPRESSION: 250,000 COPIES SOLD! ' 'Gone With The Wind' restaged in Imperial Rome' — Daily Express.

If it was not his kind of book he was clearly in the minority, thought Roche as he put the pieces together and handed them to Lexy.

'Thanks, David.' Her arm sagged as she took the book from him. 'Six hundred bloody pages!'

'Just the chapter notes at the back, dear,' said Jilly sweetly.

'But nobody reads them.'

'They're the only thing in the book worth reading.'

'But—'

Roche left them to it.

To his surprise, Roche found himself talking to Thompson within a minute of establishing his credentials with the duty man.

'You took your time,' said Thompson accusingly, as though he also had an orgy scheduled, for which he was now late thanks to Roche.

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'This isn't a metropolis—it's one of your sodding bastides,'

Roche snapped back. 'I had to find a phone.'

'You received the word about Bradford, the American?'

'Yes.' If they were beginning to run scared in Paris, as he was already running in the back-of-beyond in Neuville, then it was time to accelerate them. 'What about Stephanides?'

'Who's he?'

'She. Cypriot-Jewish. There's a he in London—her father. I was just wondering if he and she might not be Mossad, that's all.'

'What?' The cat was now among the pigeons.

'And Stein.' Roche threw in a fox for good measure. 'He's a reserve colonel in the Israeli Air Force—ex- RAF

photographic reconnaissance. Do you know about him?'

'Stein? Stephanides? Hold on there!'

'I can't wait long. I'm due at an orgy, old boy.'

'What?' Collapse of bastide-fancier . 'Wait!'

It would have been invigorating, this speedy revenge, if it had not been so frightening, this discovery of their incompetence.

It was a basic truth that none of them were omniscient, certainly not the British, but not the Russians and not the Americans either. But basic and inevitable truths didn't protect the men in the field, the Poor Bloody Infantry of all three services who had to get up out of their slit-trenches in the hope that at this precise point there were no mines and machine-gunners ahead of them.

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Mutter-mutter-mutter. There was someone else there, and not the duty officer, just as there had been when he had phoned the other side.

Roche looked at his watch. 'Oh—for Christ's sake, take your fingers out and get on with it!' he murmured into the muttering instrument.

'Roche?' the instrument squawked back at him instantly.

Who? Not the bastide- fancier —

'Sir?' he answered uneasily.

'Now . . . not to panic, Roche—' the new voice sounded almost kindly, almost reassuring, and was all the more unreassuring for that. 'Are you listening?'

'You bet I'm listening.' The new voice hadn't identified itself, it took it for granted that he could do that. But the distortion of the line confused Roche. 'And I'm not panicking, I'm only terrified half out of my wits, that's all.'

'Good, good—that's fine!' The line crackled an obscene chuckle at him, the owner of the voice mistaking his mixture of trembling fear and bitterness for British stiff upper-lip understatement of courage.

Oh— shit! thought Roche, despairing of being able to communicate the truth. 'I'm listening.'

'Fine, it's simply that the order of battle is changed a little.

Have you talked to Audley yet?'