So ... however Thomas Wiesehofer might have reacted to that threat in all his injured innocence, Benedikt Schneider wasn’t about to argue with a shot-gun in the hands of a nervous peasant.
Even the prospect of crossing swords at a disadvantage with Audley was to be preferred to that: here in England, with Colonel Butler as his last resort (however humiliating that might be, and more so than his present predicament), he could survive failure there. But a shot-gun was something else, and there would be no surviving that.
So ... better to use what time he had to compose himself, and to rehearse the Wiesehofer story, weak though it was.
Audley wouldn’t believe it, of course. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t accept it, if he judged the risk of turning the mysterious Wiesehofer loose more acceptable than detaining him, which carried the equal risk of alerting whoever had sent him to—
because he already knew too much about the Chase’s defences.
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So Audley
Therefore, at the right moment, he would have to abandon Wiesehofer for Schneider, in the role Colonel Butler had prepared for just such an emergency—
Benedikt frowned in the darkness as the thought struck him that Colonel Butler might have reckoned all along that his tricky Dr David Audley
His ears, attuned to the slightest variation in the pattern of occasional sounds from above, caught something different, diverting him from further contemplation of the idea that Colonel Butler might have been playing a deeper game: someone else was whispering up there—but stretching his hearing to its limits he still couldn’t make out individual words, only the contrast of the new sound with the gravelly undertones of the two countrymen—it was softer, almost liquid . . .it was a sound which, if amplified, would become a clear, high-pitched cry, where theirs would become an Anglo-Saxon bellow.
“Well now, let’s be seeing you then!”
A light shone into Benedikt’s face, blinding him again. But it came from a different direction—the light came from one side of the pit, the voice from the other.
“Easy now!” The voice tightened as Benedikt raised on? hand to shade his eyes. “Let’s be seeing the other hand then, if you please!
Because there’s a gun on you—
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Benedikt raised his other hand automatically.
Kelly—
The Irish voice was overlaid with years of English-speaking, but it was unmistakable.
“Please?” He packed the whole of Thomas Wiesehofer into the appeal. “What is happening? I do not understand—?”
“Of course you don’t.” Kelly agreed with him. “Mr Wiesehofer, is it? Or
He hadn’t bargained on Gunner Kelly. With Audley he would have known where he was, but the old Irishman was an unknown factor.
“Yes.” No—not quite an unknown factor, more an unexpected one at this stage of the confrontation; and he must not let mere surprise stampede him into error. The essential script still applied, subject only to appropriate amendment where necessary. “Who are you?”
He sharpened his voice.
“Who am I?” The question seemed to surprise the Irishman.
Who was he? Colonel Butler’s Special Branch officer had answered that all too sketchily, with the sort of facts a routine police inquiry might have unearthed about any honest citizen who had never tangled with authority until pure bad luck had placed him near the scene of a crime.
“Who am I, you’re asking?” The note of surprise was edged with banter, as though it ought to be obvious to Thomas Wiesehofer that such a question had no priority, coming from the bottom of a man-trap.
“Yes,” snapped Thomas Wiesehofer stoutly, ignoring the reaction to his own question. “Are you the Police?”
Silence.
“Are you the Police?” Thomas Wiesehofer, encased in the inadequate armour of injured and angry innocence, might take enough courage from that silence to repeat the question even more stoutly.
