Gunner Kelly

amateurish . . . God! If Audley hadn’t had to make do with an unskilled sentry who smoked on guard-duty he himself would be in no position now to criticise that!

Just in time, he remembered the ersatz tree-trunk— Or not just in time—it was already floating past him downstream, fatally out of reach, and the slimy cord eluded his grip long enough to make it behave—damn it, almost level with the sentry!—as no ordinary drifting log ought to behave. He would have to let the line play out

—

“Dad!”

The unexpected sound caught him with his senses at full stretch: dry mouth, although it wasn’t a Kalashnikov waiting for him in the dark—could the cigarette-smoker see the log?— and the sweet-rotten smell of the stream, of growing and summer-flowering dummy1

things, and dead things, and wet mud in his nostrils, and all the small night sounds of the countryside in his ears.

“Dad?”

This time it was a much louder whisper, urgent inquiry edged with apprehension.

“Ssssh! Over here, boy!”

The soft crunch-and-swish marked the movement of the boy towards the man through the river-bank vegetation.

“Ouch!”

“Ssssh!”

“I stung meself, Dad. Dad—”

“What you doin‘ ’ere? Does your Mum know—?” The sentry began accusingly, cutting off the boy with his first question angrily, then amending his anger with doubt in the second question.

“Yes, Dad. She said for me to come.”

Benedikt recognised the speaker. But of course—if it was anyone, it would be he!

“She—what?”

“She said I could come. She didn’t send me. Mr Kelly sent me—

she said I could come, though—”

Kelly!

“Kelly?”

Mr Kelly sent me! With those four words the greater part of his mission was accomplished: Kelly was in Duntisbury Chase.

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“The police are in the village, Dad,” Benje came to the point breathlessly.

“What?”

“The police, Dad. Mr Russell an‘ another one—an inspector, Mr Kelly told Mum . . . They went to the Bells.”

Benedikt began to play out the line, to let the log drift past the point of danger.

“The Bells?” The father didn’t sound as intelligent as the son.

“It’s okay—they didn’t catch ‘em. The till was open an’ the door locked . . . But Mr Kelly says for me to tell you to stay here

—‘cause Old Joapey can’t come yet, because he was in the Bells when the police came—”

The line tautened to full stretch. The log must be well beyond Dad by now, and there would never be a better moment to follow it, while the man was digesting this news of the police raid.

“Mr Kelly got out the back though—” continued Benje “—an‘ he came straight to Mum—”

Benedikt took a deep breath and sank into the water. It was hardly a metre deep, and he was forced to propel himself downstream like some blind and primitive amphibious creature, half swimming and half crawling: it was like nothing he had ever done before, but the need for absolute silence made further analysis impossible. All he could do was to count his strokes, allowing for the fact that some of them were hardly strokes at all, when his fingers sank into the mud or encountered harder objects—all the waterlogged and sunken detritus from the world outside and above the stream . . .

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fallen branches and tangled lumps of river-weed roots and the submerged stems of the reeds.

He counted almost to the limit before anchoring one hand in a tangle and letting himself surface, pulling sideways on his anchor as he did so, so that he came up close alongside the reeds and away from open water.

For a moment he could hear nothing. Then the soft murmur of voices came through. He had not travelled very far by the sound of them . . . not much further downstream from Dad than he had been upstream of the man before he had started. But the reeds were protectively tall, and the continuing murmur reassured him that his passage had gone unnoticed.

For another moment he was torn between the temptation to stay where he was, to listen to whatever father and son had to say to each other, or to put more distance between himself and them while he had the best chance. But the temptation to stay was a weak one: the boy’s job would have been simply to have warned his father to stay on guard, or out of the village, because his relief

—‘Old Joapey’, presumably—was otherwise engaged. It was unlikely that Kelly ... or, more likely, Audley