Gunner Kelly

Love, Becky

Butler looked at his daughter interrogatively.

“He wasn’t meant to help them,” said Jane. “He wasn’t meant to help them pull it off—he was meant to put them off.”

She was coming to it now, at last, thought Butler. But, whatever

‘it’ was, at least she wasn’t directly involved in it.

He concealed his overwhelming relief behind a frown.

Jane frowned back at him. “They’re planning to murder someone, Father,” she said.

Colonel Butler closed the door of his library behind him, shutting out the sound of the girls’ argument over which of them was going to drive the Mini, and went over to the huge mock-Tudor window.

One of Sally’s horses was cropping the grass right up against the white fence on the other side of the forecourt. As he stared at it, the dummy1

animal seemed to sense his presence and looked up towards the house incuriously for a moment. Then it lowered its head again and the grass-tearing sound re-started. On the far side of the paddock, the other two horses were similarly engaged in their endless breakfast-lunch-tea-dinner, and beyond them, the field by the road was dotted with cows which at this distance reminded him of Brittain’s farm toys with which the girls had played when they were little and untroublesome.

Butler turned his back on the scene. It had served its purpose, because now he no longer wished to commit a murder of his own, both to pre-empt that which was allegedly in train and to punish the would-be murderers for the ruination of the quiet weekend with his girls, to which he had been looking forward.

Now commonsense and reason, disciplined by duty, had reasserted themselves. There were even books there on the shelves to remind him— there, high up on the left—that the rebellious American colonies had been supposedly lost because of the devotion of King George III’s ministers to carefree weekends . . . and there, two shelves down and to the right, that ‘lose not an hour’ had been Horatio Nelson’s watchword.

His eye travelled along the shelves, down to the other end of the long room: and there, also, was the gazetteer in which he could pinpoint the village of Duntisbury Royal, to direct him in turn to the right inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map from the shelf below, on which he could pin the gazetteer’s point exactly, if necessary.

The Mini’s engine roared outside. (Whichever of them was at the dummy1

wheel, she would take the drive too fast, and the corner at the entrance too dangerously, with all the reckless immortality of youth, untainted by experience and protected only by youth’s split-second reflexes.)

(David Audley had the experience, and to spare, and a rare quality of intuition. But he also had his blind spots, and he no longer had the reflexes for field-work, unescorted.) He listened to the engine-note, gauging the car’s exact position until it finally snarled away in the distance, on the main road, holding his breath until then. (There was nothing he could do about the girls: they were their own women now, for better or for worse, and he could only come to them when they called him. But there was a great deal he could do—and must do—about David Audley.) If necessary.

No certainty animated him yet, as he moved round the big desk, and sat down behind it, and reached decisively for the red telephone, with its array of buttons. Others, more gifted with that wild Fifth Sense than he, might be able to move from the known via the unknowable to the most likely. But he could only advance by experience and the map references of information received.

He lifted the red phone and pressed two of the buttons simultaneously. Two red eyes lit up, one steady, one blinking insistently. He watched them until they both turned green.

“Duty officer? I wish to speak with Chief Inspector Andrew. When you get him, patch him through to me on this line, please.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Thank you.”

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He replaced the receiver, so that one of the green eyes went out while the other turned red again, holding the scrambled line. Then he reached out, almost reluctantly, for the other phone—the ordinary humdrum Telecom instrument, beloved of Diana, Sally and Jane to his great quarterly cost, and dialled his required number, for all to hear who wanted to hear.

“The Old House.”

The childish treble rendered his next question superfluous. “Cathy

—are either of your parents home?” It pained Colonel Butler’s super-ego that he was glad his little god- daughter had been closest to the phone.

“Uncle Jack! Yes—Mummy is.” The breathlessness of her evident pleasure turned the pain into a wound. “Are you coming to my birthday party next Saturday?”

“Your birthday party?” Butler feigned surprise. “Have you got another birthday? How many birthdays a year do you have? Are you like the Queen? Is this your official birthday—or your real birthday? You can’t expect me to keep track of all your different birthdays—I’m much too busy for that, young lady!”

“But I haven’t—” The child caught herself a second too late, birthday-excitement betraying intelligence “—if you’re too busy . . . then that’s your hard luck— you don’t get any of the cake

— and you don’t come to the dinner afterwards, with Paul and Elizabeth, and pineapple Malakoff and Muscat de Beaumes de Venise in the funny bottle— okay?” Cathy added her special birthday pudding and its attendant wine to her other favourite grown-ups like a visiting Russian nobleman and his exquisite dummy1

French mistress, joining in the game. “But Daddy’s not here, anyway—he’s in Dorset, digging up Romans and looking at tanks . . . but Mummy’s here, if you want her—”

Conflicting emotions warred in Butler’s breast: his much-loved and super-intelligent god-daughter had given him what he wanted