Gunner Kelly

whichever way it concerned something of interest to an archaeologist, but a warning to someone who wasn’t.”

Colonel Butler stirred. “Aye—that would be Audley!” He spoke with feeling. “That would be Audley to the life!”

Benedikt turned to him. “But he could hardly have known what I was doing there.” The curiosity which had been consuming him drove him on now. “Or, if he did, he knows more than I know, anyway.”

“Aye.” The candid expression on Colonel Butler’s face suggested depressingly that such might well be the case. “Happen he does, Captain . . . happen he does.”

The English construction ‘happen’ threw Benedikt for a moment, until he concluded it must be a dialect word, meaning ‘perhaps’.

“But not from me, sir.”

“No.” Butler’s harsh features softened. “You’ve done very well, Captain Schneider. I’m grateful to you.”

Now was the time, when the Colonel had spoken to him, but evidently thought that his brief and unimaginative report, plus the Fighting Man episode, was all that he had to tell: now the Colonel was ready for him.

“I don’t mean just from me—from what I said.” The final lesson of the seminar on de-briefing surfaced in his memory: and this, a de-briefing by a foreigner unwilling to press him too hard, was an exemplar of that lesson, that the correct delivery of information could be almost as important as the information itself, if it was to convince the listener!

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“Go on, Captain.” Colonel Butler knew there was more.

“Yes, sir.” He could feel the Colonel’s attention concentrate on him. “The brief which was given to me, with Major Herzner’s agreement, was that I should go down to Duntisbury Chase and have a look round it, to see what was there—to see who was there ... to see if there was anything to be seen—if there was anything out of place. A reconnaissance, in fact.”

“A reconnaissance—aye, Captain.”

“Yes. I was told only that Dr David Audley was there, which might otherwise have surprised me—taken me by surprise, I mean.”

Colonel Butler said nothing to that.

“From that I chose to assume that. . . first. . . you were using me on unofficial attachment because—”

“Official attachment, Captain Schneider,” snapped Butler. “Your transfer to London is to liaise with the appropriate British intelligence agencies.”

“Yes, sir. But not for another ten days—and because I’m not known over here—because I have no experience of British operations and I’m not known over here ... no more than Dr Wiesehofer is known, as it happens—”

“All right, Captain. So you’re not known.” Butler lifted his chin belligerently. “Or ... let us say . . . what you did in Sonnenstrand, and what you’ve been doing in Yugoslavia since then, isn’t known

—to those who don’t need to know it—right?”

Benedikt swallowed. It was as Herzner had said: Don’t be deceived into thinking that his bite won’t be as bad as his bark just because dummy1

he looks like one of their sergeant-majors. . .

But he had to go on now, even though he didn’t fancy moving from first to second. “Yes, sir. So . . .”

“So I didn’t have anyone else to use at short notice, who wouldn’t be known to David Audley?” Butler brushed his hesitation aside.

“Very well—you can assume that, too—just so long as you also assume . . . no, not assume—so long as you also rely on the certainty that Dr Audley is a senior officer of unimpeachable reliability, on whose loyalty I would bet my life as well as yours—

that will save us all time . . . and it may even save you from a certain amount of worry and embarrassment, according to how accurate the print-out from your Wiesbaden computer has been.

Right, Captain?”

Right, Captain? Audley was a specialist—and very nearly an exclusive specialist, too—on Soviet intentions. And that had been worrying—no question about that! But ... so where had the Kommissar got it wrong? That was worrying, too.

But he still had to go on, jumping some of his clever assumptions which had maybe not been so clever.

“A reconnaissance, Captain.” Butler exercised the senior officer’s prerogative of mercy. “We’ll come back to Audley later ... A reconnaissance, you were saying?”

The correct response to mercy, when there was no other alternative, was confession.

“You are quite right. There is something wrong with Duntisbury Chase.” The pressure on him suddenly crystallised all Benedikt’s dummy1

impressions. “I’ve never been in a place like it—not even on the other side.” The crystallisation left him with an extraordinary and frightening near-certainty which up until this moment had been a subjective theory he would only have dared to advance tentatively.

Even . . . even though he believed it himself, now, as all the pieces of it slotted into the places which had been made to fit them, it seemed quite outrageous for a stretch of peaceful English countryside.