Gunner Kelly

They walked in silence for a time, until they came to a curious open grassy ditch which divided off the well-cut manor lawn from the rougher sheep-cropped pasture of the ridge. The upper side of it sloped gently, but the manor side was revetted vertically with stone to form a sunken wall protecting the garden without breaking the clear view from below.

Another sniper’s post, thought Benedikt, running his eye along the trench until he reached its junction with the highest point of the wood on their left. But then he caught a glimpse of movement under the trees—

“It’s all right,” said Audley soothingly. “It’s ‘one of ours’, as they say. And we are not the target, as I say.”

Benedikt turned towards him. “But Mr Kelly is?”

“Ah . . .” Audley stared back the way they had come. “This will do well enough. We’d see more if we went higher, but you can get some idea of it from here.”

The rise of the lawn was greater than Benedikt had expected it to be. Beyond the manor house below, he could see the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping from among the village trees, with the squat church tower to their left marking the position of the Roman dummy1

villa field on the edge of the inadequate River Addle.

“Peaceful little place, isn’t it?” Audley invited him to disagree.

“I did not find it so last night,” Benedikt obliged him.

“No. But then you did rather invite trouble—like Mr King in Colonel Dabney’s covers . . . Do you read Kipling?” Audley raised a mild eyebrow inquiringly. “No ... I suppose not . . . But what am I to do with you, then?”

Now they had come to it. “I do not see that there is anything that you can do with me, Dr Audley—if you know me so well—?”

“Oh, I do, Captain Schneider, I do. And it’s a good report I have of you, too: good soldier, good officer . . . good son, good Christian . . . good German, I suppose one might say, even.” He looked sidelong at Benedikt. “But you know what we used to say about good Germans in the old days? Your distinguished father would know—he was a damn good German, if ever there was one!”

“My father?” Audley’s private source, whatever or whoever it was, was also a damn good one. “He would be delighted to hear himself described as ‘distinguished’, I am sure, Dr Audley.”

“ ‘David’—do call me ‘David’. It’s so much harder to sound offensive with Christian names, don’t you think? So may I call you

‘Benedikt’?” Audley hardly waited for a reply. “He certainly is—

and was—distinguished . . . Distinguished scholar now, and distinguished soldier once upon a time ... An anti- tank gunner, I believe? Eighty-eights in the desert, with the goth Light? I must say I’m extremely glad I was never in his sights!”

Benedikt realised the condition of the ‘good Germans’ to whom dummy1

Audley had been referring, which would be the same for ’good Englishmen‘—and ’good Indians‘—down history, and which was hardly reassuring now.

“The trouble is, Benedikt, that now I appear to be in your sights.

And I’m afraid that I must insist on your telling me why, without more ado,” concluded Audley.

“Insist?”

Audley gave a little shrug.

“Or else . . . what?” Benedikt did not like being leaned on. “If you keep me here I shall be missed—and there will be those who will come to look for me. You can depend on that . . . David.”

“My dear fellow! They may look—” Audley swept a hand over the valley “—it may not seem so very big, but it hid one German in it for fifteen centuries . . . Also the people here are good at digging deep holes, as you discovered last night. And if that sounds rather barbarous . . . there is one thing I’d perhaps better explain which you must bear in mind.”

“And that is?” He sensed that Audley was not so much threatening, whatever he sounded like, as softening him up to make a deal—

which might well be what Colonel Butler had intended all along.

Yet whatever he could get for free he might as well get. “And that is?”

“The Old General—‘the Squire’, interchangeably, as they call him . . . They really did love him . . . He seems to have been a good man in the oldest and best sense of the word—a man of instinctive . . . ‘goodness’ is the only word for it: there simply dummy1

wasn’t badness in him—rather the way some men are utterly brave because they simply don’t know how to be cowardly, like the rest of us ... I met men like that in the war—I’m sure there were lots of Germans just like them —they generally get a lot of other people killed without intending to, in my experience—but the completely good people are much rarer, and nicer . . . though it seems, from what is happening here, that they can produce the same unfortunate result . . .” He shook his head sadly. “But they really did love him.

And now they’re very angry indeed, because Gunner Kelly has undertaken to bring the Old General’s killer—or killers—back here, so they’ve got something to focus their anger on.”

“How is he bringing them back?”

“He won’t say. All he’ll say is that he was the real target of that bomb, so he has the contacts—”

“He was?” Benedikt simulated astonishment.

“That’s right. And he won’t explain that either—it’ll only make them targets as well, he says. And—” Audley