Here Be Monsters

And true, he had been momentarily querulous at the sight of the little Morgan, into which he would not fit easily. But then, again, he had quickly adjusted himself to the imposition, mentally as well as physically, launching instead into a long anecdote about a hot-shot USAF pilot he'd once known, who had once owned just such a car -

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'Flew Voodoos, out of Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire - photographic reconnaissance — took some very pretty snapshots for us on one occasion too, much to the annoyance of a certain ally across the Channel… Bought himself one of these — same colour, British Racing Green, naturally. And you know what tickled him most, Elizabeth?'

Too relaxed, she thought. But no, she didn't know, she had said.

'Bought it from the factory (he'd been on the waiting list for years, of course), and paid for it in cash… some of which we'd just given him, for services rendered… but most of which was gambling profits — he was a mean poker player… But, anyway, he paid in cash, and there was seventeen shillings and fourpence change to come from his money. And they only had pound notes, so they sent an apprentice lad across the road to a pub to get him his seventeen-and-four, down to the last penny. Tickled him pink, that did.'

Much too relaxed. It hadn't tickled her at all.

'What was his provenance?' Although they weren't quite out of London proper the traffic was already thinning in the brief gap between closing time and early departure home.

'Was he ever in the real army - Red Army?'

'So he maintained. One of the heroes of the Patriotic War, who ran up the red flag over the Reichstag, or the Brandenburg Gate, or some such place, in '45. But I have my doubts, although he had his army stuff off pat, certainly. So they say.'

She was meant to pick that up. 'You never interrogated him?'

'No.' He gazed ahead sightlessly. 'He came across just about the time I came into the Service. So I was doing my homework while they were taking him apart. And I suppose you could say he was out of my league.'

Elizabeth drove in silence for a time, beckoned by the motorway signs. Paul had warned her that she would be out of her league in this affair, but that wasn't a bad way of improving one's game. All the same, the idea of an age of the world when David Audley had not been in the Blues' team overawed her somewhat: it was a defect in her powers of imagination that she could not readily enough accept that those who were old had once been young - that dear old Major Birkenshawe had once been a dashing subaltern, and even Father had been a dewy-eyed little midshipman - even Father!

'There were three of them, who assessed him - all Fred Clinton's trusted cronies. One was a don from Cambridge, who'd been a Doublecross consultant; one was ex-SOE -one of the few Fred had been really thick with, and had kept an eye on; and there was a soldier, an ex-dummy2

regular who'd watched Fred's back during the war. And he was the one who didn't reckon Gorbatov as a front line warrior: 'In the army, but not of it'… meaning that he'd been NKVD from the cradle, keeping watch on the lads as they carried the red banners westwards.'

The West, the final blue sign ahead proclaimed, echoing him and inviting her into the fast lane.

'His version - Gorbatov's version - was that he'd been talent-spotted by one of Ignatiev's lieutenants in 1950, as a politically reliable career soldier. A very tough egg by the name of Okolovich - Anatoli Okolovich. And we knew all about him … In fact, he was an up-and-coming man at that time, and an invitation from him to join the happy band certainly wouldn't have admitted refusal: it would have been either the Communist Party or the farewell party.'

That was one of Paul's little black jokes, so maybe it had started as one of Audley's.

Elizabeth took a quick sidelong look at the big man beside her. He was so utterly unlike Paul in so many ways that the ways in which they were like each other - ways which were sometimes no more than similar phrases and jokes trivializing unpalatable truths -

emphasized their underlying similarity. So -, allowing physically for Paul's age and much better looks, and mentally for his admiration of Audley, was this the shape of Paul Mitchell to come?

'So he did the sensible thing, and ended up in '56 as General Okolovich's leg-man in eastern Hungary, when the balloon went up there. Except that, according to him, he'd been feeding the General with soldierly warnings about trouble in store… which Okolovich had unwisely bowdlerized before passing on to his ambassador, one Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov - you remember him, Elizabeth?' He turned towards her. 'What's the matter, Elizabeth?'

She glanced at her mirror again. 'There's a police car about three hundred yards behind us.

He's waiting for me to put my foot down.'

'Ah!' He nodded, and then hunched himself to view her speedometer. '72-3? Young woman in British Racing Green sports car? Do you always play with policemen like this?

It's very naughty.'

'I just don't want to get stopped, that's all.'

'No? But you could show him your card then - and make him hate you. And then put your foot right down again, and make him hate you even more. Paul - your own Paul - does that all the time, so I'm told.'

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'I'm not Paul.' She decided not to rise to 'your own Paul'.

'Is there any reason why I should be hurrying? When are we meeting Major Turnbull at this pub of yours?'

She studied her mirror again. The police car would drop her at the next junction. 'Would that be about 5.30? You know more about opening times than I do.'

'I suppose so.' He looked at her innocently. 'I take it that you've had lunch? You couldn't have spent half the