Here Be Monsters

'That's right - clever Elizabeth!' He waved at the tractor-driver. 'Two years before, certain persons - mostly young, or youngish, age not known exactly - certain persons - Anglo-Saxon, or maybe Anglo-American, nationality not known exactly - spent some days abroad in high summer, when half the likely lads in the Western World were stretching their wings:

' There's the haystack, Audley, my lad' , says old Fred Clinton. ' Find me some needles' . Phooey!'

They were among the first houses.

'No computers, remember, Elizabeth. Just one temporary secretary and two researchers was all we could run to. Apart from which, it wasn't at all the sort of job I'd expected to be doing - sweating over lists of names, and generally having to behave like a grubby divorce investigator.' He sighed. 'Delusions of grandeur.'

'But - ' She had to keep an eye open for the King's Arms now ' - it was important, surely - ?'

'Ah! Now was it?' He gestured ahead. 'It's a bit further on… The Americans thought so.

They had a whole team working on it. But I didn't -I wasn't so sure.'

'Why not? If Kryzhanovsky was top brass, David. And Shelepin and the others?'

'Oh yes - all big time stuff.' He nodded. 'But we only had the Hungarian's word for it. Plus old Gorbatov's dates. But suppose they weren't on the level - what then, Elizabeth?'

The road widened suddenly, into a miniature village square, with straggling uneven terraces of houses set back on three sides, and the church on her right, away beyond the churchyard and inevitable war memorial.

'It could have been all pure disinformation, designed to divert us from more important things - as it damn well did, in fact, whatever it was. Over there - ' He pointed across the square ' - see the sign?' , A coaching inn it certainly was, complete with an arched gateway to admit its coaches into a cobbled yard beyond. But there was another farm tractor labouring across her bows, towing a waggonload of baled straw.

'Go under the arch,' ordered Audley. 'Or suppose it was half-genuine, eh? Like… if the Hungarian was kosher, so they'd thrown old Gorbatov at us, like a bit of over-ripe beef-strictly expendable, with the wrong dates - how's that for size?'

Elizabeth stared at the King's Arms, computing both ends of the puzzle against its middle.

The trouble was, though, it had more than two ends: because, although David was an expert on disinformation tactics, both Eastern and Western (and it was even his contention that every operation should have a disinformation cover built into it as its first line of dummy2

defense), it was also the case that David was defending himself now against Oliver St John Latimer. So he had a vested interest in debunking Debrecen in 1984, even more than in 1958.

'Go on, Elizabeth - ' He pointed ahead again ' - I'm dying for my cup of tea. And my sandwiches. And my pint. In that order, but with very short intervals between.'

Wisps of straw from the bales lay in the street, and as she stared a faint breath of wind animated them as though they still had life in them.

Delusions of grandeur, she thought: Audley's then, back in the 1950s, but perhaps hers now, in the 1980s - and Paul had warned her about that, in so many words, risking his own professional skin in doing so.

And… all those great names which Audley had casually dropped - great Russian Names of Power from the past, about which she had read during the last two years - Andropov and Ignatiev, Shelepin, Zhurkin and Semichastny - names not really so very different from those ruthless English Elizabethans about whom she had taught her history scholarship sixth formers, almost only the day before yesterday: William Cecil for Yuri Andropov, and Francis Walsingham for Alexander Shelepin - and Sir Thomas Gresham and Archbishop Bancroft, and all the rest of the Tudor sixteenth-century espionage apparat.

But now she, little stupid Elizabeth Loftus, who had thought herself so clever, was here in her green Morgan outside the King's Arms, Fordingwell, beside her own private Francis Walsingham, trying to out-think him - what foolishness was this?

But then Father nodded at her, agreeing with her at last for once!

'Come on!' said Audley irritably, almost old-maidishly. 'When you get to my age, young woman - then the creature-comforts begin to matter.'

She looked at him. 'If all that's true - or any of it -then why did Major Parker go to see Squadron Leader Thomas - Dr Thomas? And why did someone push Parker off the Pointe du Hoc?'

'What?' He hadn't expected her to bite back. But he was still her own Francis Walsingham, and didn't like being bitten. 'Jesus Christ, Elizabeth - you tell me! Or, better still, you ask Major Turnbull - our mysterious, equivocal galloping major - you ask him about the late Mrs Squadron Leader Dr Thomas - ' He looked at his watch ' - you ask him that in about fifteen minutes' time, young woman… And then you ask me the same question - right?'

She put the Morgan in gear. The square, was wide-open, and there was nothing coming dummy2

left and right, so she went through the archway trailing an angry, irresponsible zroom, to halt one yard short of a trough of geraniums inside the yard with a jerk which would have put Francis Walsingham through the windscreen if he had not been wearing his seat-belt.

'We're booked in, I take it?' If it had been Paul she might have added ' And in two single rooms?' But that was one thing she didn't have to worry about with David Audley, because of his dearly-beloved Faith.

'Yes - ' He struggled with his safety-belt' - how d'you get this damn thing off?'