Gunner Kelly

rather special, so it seems— something out of the past, just as Duntisbury Chase and Duntisbury Royal are also out of the past, and rather special. . . I think we have to accept that they conceive they have a duty— that they loved him and that therefore they have the obligation and the right to avenge him, Captain.”

That was the motive-power behind direct action, and what made it so dangerous: it had the powerful fuels of love and duty and self-righteousness in the engine-room, which gave ordinary decent men and women the resolution to act and to endure.

He could see the tall cross of the War Memorial ahead of him now, between two of the ancient yew-trees which the English habitually planted in their churchyards—

The question was not where the true power came from— here, in this churchyard, approaching that cross, which was the symbol of the Saviour of both the English and the Germans in their last hour, commemorating the fallen on both sides— which had been Papa’s cross and Mother’s cross simultaneously . . . the question was who was on the bridge here, at the controls, in the driving seat, dummy1

directing that power to what ends?

He came to the churchyard’s wicket-gate, close by the memorial and with the loom of the Eight Bells on his left. There was a single light in the public house, but in a dormer window in the roof, not at ground level; yet there was no police car in the car park—there were no cars at all... And Colonel Butler had promised that the police would stay in the village, prowling around, until after midnight.

He looked at his watch.

The question was . . . but the question divided itself as he approached it...

Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal might have desired vengeance, but they would not have known how to encompass it.

Mr Kelly— Gunner Kelly, from long ago—would have desired that same vengeance . . . and if Colonel Butler’s guess was correct Kelly was the extra ingredient in the Duntisbury Chase conspiracy.

But it was Dr David Audley who gave that conspiracy a dimension of importance to the security of the state— who, if the Colonel was right, would not be interested in vengeance, and who would not connive in murder, least of all a murder by Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, whose welfare he had promised to safeguard.

But now the more important question was . . . how long after midnight would the police prowl around Duntisbury Royal? And that relegated all the other questions to temporary obscurity.

Through the wicket-gate—it had been well-oiled at midday, so it dummy1

would not betray him now—and quickly across the road to the grass verge on the other side: at least he possessed the enormous advantage of having walked through the village this afternoon in Benje’s company, even if he had been steered away from the lodge gates, and the lodge, and the manor house itself.

And another thing was for sure: he could not approach the lodge, where Gunner Kelly lived, directly from the road. If there had been someone on watch at the ford and near the footbridge, there would surely be someone in the tangle of shrubbery on each side keeping an eye on those iron gates. But that presented no special problem, because where the grounds of the manor fronted the village there was a thick belt of trees held back by a stone wall; and the wall, neither too high nor (so far as he had observed) topped with spikes or broken glass, he could scale at any point (spikes and lacerating points of glass would not be the Maxwell family style: the esteem in which they were held suggested to Benedikt that they would fight their intruders fairly, without such unpleasantness).

Where to cross the wall, though . . . that had to be an arbitrary decision: not too close to the lodge entrance, but it was a long wall, undulating with the rise and fall of the land itself, so not too far away either.

When he was half-way to the gates, approaching headlights drove him down into the shelter of the convenient gateway of a darkened cottage: he shrank close to a thick hedge until the vehicle cruised past slowly, its lights searching out the road ahead of it; but, with relief, he saw that it was Mr Russell’s police car, unmistakable with its broad red-stripe-against-white as it rolled by, even though dummy1

its illuminated Police sign was not switched on. And with Mr Russell still in Duntisbury Royal now he could reasonably depend on a few undisturbed minutes. Darkness and silence settled back in its wake, and this piece of wall was as good as any other.

Over the wall, under the trees, it was darker still, and he would dearly have liked the help of the torch with which the SAS cylinder had supplied him. But although it was impossible now to move in total silence, the thick carpet of leaves, soft and springy under his feet, blanked out all but the occasional sound.

Also, the trees were not so thick that he couldn’t make out the obstacles ahead of him: separate tangles of branches and thickets of vegetation in clearings routed him through the woods along an obvious path, with no real alternative. And he knew, estimating distance half by experience from the afternoon and half by his sixth directional sense, that he was making progress to where he wanted to go, safely inside the manor grounds at the rear of the house itself.

Then his next step sank deeper into the leaves—

And deeper—

And deeper— and suddenly too deep—

Too late, he tried to throw his weight back, as his foot sank down past ankle, past knee—suddenly he had no foot, no ankle, no knee, no leg, and he was trying to fall back, but he was falling forwards into ground which was opening up underneath him—

dummy1

V

The pit, on a quick estimate, was something more than three metres deep—nearer four even—and at least two metres square at the bottom. And its walls were sheer.

Not to panic, Benedikt admonished himself.

He switched off his torch and extended his arms on each side of him, adjusting his position until he lost contact with the side closest to where he had landed. Even with the torch as an extension to one hand he couldn’t touch both walls simultaneously, and the same applied when he swivelled through ninety degrees.

More than two metres wide each way, then. And probably three metres deep. And sheer-walled.

He stood absolutely still, counting off his heart-beats until he was sure he could hear no sound but the thump in