Gunner Kelly

Sally gave her younger sibling one quick, sharp glance, and then picked up the plate again and was gone before Butler could say a word. And that, if anything had been required to consolidate Butler’s disquiet, confirmed it beyond question: however much they might be at odds on day-to-day matters, they never failed to decode each other’s Most Urgent signals in an emergency.

dummy1

Silly was what worried him now. Because, where Sally and Diana were given to hyperbole, Jane’s weakness was understatement, so that she would not admit to being unwell until she was too ill to walk.

Suddenly, he found himself simultaneously suppressing reasons for panic while discounting them: she was only nineteen years old, but hard-headed and sensible with it. . . but she was still only nineteen years old—

The Mini was still in pristine condition—he had washed it himself on Sunday, and it bore no marks of any chance encounters—and Jane wasn’t the hit-and-run type— Or ... No—No. Butler had staked his life on several occasions when the odds were better not computed, but he was quite happy to stake it again this morning across the breakfast-table that his youngest daughter wasn’t pregnant. All the known facts of circumstance and character were against it, apart from the cheerfulness of her greeting only a few minutes before —

Only a few minutes before? Butler’s eyes dropped to the table, to beside her plate on it: one letter, but hand- written, not official—

just a few lines on a single sheet of paper, without even an address so far as he could see at the distance and upside-down—hardly more than a brief scrawl, but signed with a flourish—

He raised his eyes to meet hers, with his imagination up against a blank wall of incomprehension.

“I went to see David, Father.”

“David?” Jane had no boyfriend named David. In fact, Jane had no dummy1

boy-friend, full-stop.

“Uncle David, Father.”

Butler was there as she spoke. David was David Audley —and, somewhat to his surprise, that in itself was reassuring: no matter how eccentric, even maverick, Audley might be in professional matters, when it came to Jane he had no doubt that the man would behave responsibly. Even . . . with the untimely death of Jane’s godfather, Audley rather quaintly regarded himself as an unofficial substitute for that role, for which only one other parent had regarded him suitable, to his chagrin.

So, for once at least, and in this instance in particular, Audley could be trusted, surely—

Surely? He looked at Jane. “You went to see David Audley?”

“About Becky, Father—Becky Smith.” Jane nodded.

“Becky Smith?” Butler repeated the name blankly, aware that he might have registered any young man’s name for future reference, but that no female from school or university would have fixed herself in his mind unless he could add a face to a name. And there was no file in his memory on any Becky Smith.

“Rebecca Maxwell-Smith—you don’t know her, Father, but I’ve mentioned her. She’s reading Law with me—we live the same hall of residence ... I had dinner with her in grandfather once—you remember, I told you, Father.”

Something faintly registered now, but only faintly. “So?” He was ashamed to admit the faint registration.

“So she had this hare-brained idea—more than harebrained, bloody dummy1

mad . . . But she was hell-bent on it, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her—absolutely bloody mad . . . But I thought I had to stop her somehow ...” She tailed off, and the very imprecision of her account of what Rebecca Maxwell-Smith was hell-bent on re-animated Butler’s concern, for all that it was safely one step away from her now; because if there was one thing that Jane Butler was—apart from being nineteen and hard-headed and sensible—it was to the point. And at the moment she was circling the point like a mongoose round a snake.

Even Butler himself was infected by her caution. “Why didn’t you come to me?” She would come to the vital answer in her own good time, with no need for the question.

“You didn’t come home on Friday.” She excused herself by accusing him. “Becky phoned—I was going to ask you, but you weren’t there . . . And you always said, if there was a problem Nannie Hooker couldn’t solve, and you weren’t here, we could phone Uncle David.”

True, thought Butler. But that was for you—and your problems.

And the odds on this one are that you probably wouldn’t have asked me anyway.. . . Yet, at the same time, it was the old fatal error he had made, of giving a precise command imprecisely, so that she had been able to obey him in circumstances he had not envisaged, disobediently.

“So what did he say?” This time, as he phrased the indirect question with false sincerity, leaving Rebecca Maxwell-Smith’s as-yet-unrevealed madness even further behind, he felt that little frisson of excitement he always did where David Audley was dummy1

involved: no one could ever be quite sure what Audley would do in any situation, including Audley himself.

“He said he’d help—of course.” Jane’s expression indicated that she had only just discovered what her father and others had learnt by experience. “But now I’ve received this from Becky—!”

She pushed the letter across the table towards Butler.

There were only a dozen or so words on it, with no sender’s address, as he had already noted, and no date either. Jay— Thanks a million for sending us your David.

Now we really have a chance of pulling it off-—