Gunner Kelly

before that. . . And in the village, when I walked round it, there was this woman on a bicycle who seemed to follow us—”

“Us?”

Benedikt smiled. “There were these two little boys I met, on their racing bicycles—they showed me round . . . Before lunch they took me to the Roman villa, and afterwards they led me through the village, to the footpath which leads to the Duntisbury Rings—”

Benje had been dismissive: “She’s just an old nosey-parker— you don’t want to take any notice of her.”

She had been tall and thin, riding a tall and thin bicycle unbalanced by an immense wicker basket resting on her front mudguard. But she had been there behind them, off and on, until the second man had appeared.

“—and after her there was another man—”

dummy1

The man with the gun couched under his arm, on the skyline.

“That’s Old Levi— from the Almshouses. He lives on boiled sausages, Mum says— and boiled rabbits, when he can bag one,

‘cause there’re not many of them around . . . An’ he sleeps in his gumboots, Mum says . . . Because when they took him into the cottage hospital, when he had ‘flu, they had to cut them off his feet, to get him into bed— yrrrch!”

But Old Levi—(who didn’t look particularly old, from the way he kept up with them; but everyone who wasn’t obviously young was old to Benje and Darren) but Old Levi had paced them, on the skyline and off it, all the way from Duntisbury Rings to Caesar’s Camp, and then down along the possible terrace of the Roman agger into the valley, to the sun-dappled pools where the stream idled between the trees—

Another thought struck him, which dove-tailed beautifully with everything else he had said, like the good work of a master carpenter slotting together, yet much more frightening, and much more humiliatingly—

“What’s the matter?” It was the Chief Inspector who had read his face more quickly.

The little boys! thought Benedikt. The little clever boys, with their clever and insistent questions—?

But he had clued himself to the answer, with his own remembrance of that village near Leipzig two years ago, when because of his stupidity the Russians and the East Germans had both been close behind him—inescapably close—with the women carrying their dummy1

sheets off the line, down by another stream, and the children coming back from school, staring at him with huge eyes until the women had sent them about their business as he had slipped away into the trees—

All he had to do was to reverse the situation—he had said as much himself: I’ve never been in a place like it, not even on the other side

— to become an enemy, not a friend!

But here in England—?

Here in England, too! Yes!

He looked at Chief Inspector Andrew, then at Colonel Butler. “I think I have been stupid, you know.”

They both waited for the end-product of that conclusion.

“It is not that I have given anything away. Perhaps quite the contrary . . . But I have nevertheless been stupid.”

Suddenly he saw the little girl beside the water-splash, sitting on the footbridge in her grubby dress, and then ducking behind the phone-box. And then into it—

“Yes . . . these two small boys, who accompanied me . . . not so little, but not big boys . . .”

“Little boys?” Butler regarded him incredulously.

“They attached themselves to me.” There had been no escape from them then, and there was no escape from them now. “I...I have experience with boys. I have nephews . . . and I help to run a youth club for the church, in the place where I live, when I am there.”

The need for honesty outweighed the burden of his humiliation: in a de-briefing honesty was essential, anything less than the truth dummy1

mediated against security. “I thought to use them—to ask questions which I could not so easily ask their elders.”

“Yes?” The Special Branch man was there.

“I thought I was cultivating them. But now I’m not sure that it wasn’t the other way round—that they were questioning me . . .

And that they were watching me more closely than their elders could have done—that the woman, and the second man . . . they were the back-up, watching over the boys, rather than watching me.”

“Yeah—y eah!!” Chief Inspector Andrew at least didn’t find it outrageous. “I’ve seen little kids look out for their elder brothers, on a job . . . Nothing like this, of course. But if you’ve got a bright kid . . .” He nodded at Butler.

“God bless my soul!” The Colonel took a moment to adjust to the idea. “Children?”

“These were clever children, sir.” Benedikt himself still couldn’t quite accept the little girl at the water-splash. “They were at... is it