For the Good of the State

‘Oh!’ The boy rose up on one tip-toe to apply his other foot to its pedal. ‘In that case… follow me! ’ Then he vanished again.

Tom backed the car obediently, until he reached the hedgerow gap again, and saw that he had been right the first time: the overgrown legend or the sign did indeed indicate that The Old House lay somewhere down the equally overgrown lane down which the boy had invited him. But of the boy himself, and the bicycle, there was no sign.

Twenty yards down the lane there was a gap in the great tangle of thorn and blackberry bushes on his left, revealing a tiny brick Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State cottage surrounded by apple-trees and an immaculately-tilled vegetable garden. But there was no boy and no bicycle waiting for him at its picket-gate. And there wasn’t any garage, or even a break in the brief ramshackle fence, and the lane continued beyond the gap; so did Audley have a son, then—and a wife—in this Old House of his? Harvey hadn’t said—Harvey must simply have taken it for granted that he knew, or that it was of no importance; or maybe Harvey had left him to stew in his own juice, on being dismissed; but he hadn’t thought to ask, anyway.

He accelerated cautiously. If the boy was Audley’s… allowing that he might be a spindly-twelve, home from some expensive local prep school… that would predi-cate a much younger wife, or an elderly mother—?

He was in the midst of an annoyingly ill-founded and inadequately-based hypothesis when the hedge fell away abruptly, and he saw what was undoubtedly The Old House, on his right—old stone and buttressed—an ancient roof, with an early-sixteenth-century pitch: as a house it hardly made sense in its lack of coherent architectural purpose, with what looked like a barn abutting it—a buttressed barn also, without windows, but with a fine arched doorway wide enough for a loaded wagon, and built of fine ashlar much too good for any barn in a countryside where worked-stone would have been at a premium, with no quarries handy, or rivers up which such stone could easily be brought.

He had to swing the wheel hard again as the lane ended while he was making nonsense of what he saw, to bring the car round into a wide square of gravel, in the L-shape of the eccentric house and the Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State impossible barn: stone like that was like gold-dust—or gold-blocks

—like the high-cost outer skin of castles designed to resist rams at close quarters, or petraries and mangonels and trebuchets at a distance, in siege warfare; or to impress the neighbours when English life became more settled and civilized… but not for a bloody barn— not stone as beautiful as that, for God’s sake!

But there was a ditch, right in the middle of an expanse of rough-cut fieldgrass—

Tom got out of the car, frowning. It didn’t look like a serious defensive ditch, for there was no sign of berm or rampart. But maybe there’d been a palisade—it could have been a pathetically-defended manor house, or even an Anglo-Saxon site… compared with Norman works, domestic Anglo-Saxon work was a joke, mostly. And it was undoubtedly a very old ditch—

‘Can I help you?’

The question caught Tom between the shoulder-blades, at his greatest disadvantage, back in another time.

‘Yes—’ He swivelled in the gravel ‘—I’m sorry—’

‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw?’

‘Yes.’ Tall, thin, blonde—slightly faded blonde—fortyish, and well short of pretty, but not uninteresting, Tom registered in quick succession: typical well-bred English stock, perhaps a shade over-bred.

‘Yes.’ She agreed with him coolly. ‘My husband’s office phoned.’

‘Yes?’ There was something not quite right about that vague, haughty stare of hers. Tom was used to people staling at him Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State unbelievingly—as the young policeman had done at first this morning, before the penny dropped; never mind his unEnglish face, few people knew what a baronetcy was, and expected an elderly knight, dubbed for long years of distinguished civil service or exuding commercial power and prestige. But although this woman wasn’t the type to make that mistake—and wasn’t quite staring unbelievingly, anyway—there was still something wrong.

‘Yes—’ He smiled hesitantly. ‘—I’m not late, am I?’

‘No.’ She ignored the smile. ‘But you do have some form of…’

she extended a long thin-fingered hand on the end of a matchstick arm ‘… of identification—?’

‘Oh—yes!’ The extraordinary thing was that she was somehow rather sexy with it—matchstick arms, vague expression and ash-blonde hair so pale that no one would know when she went off-white, thought Tom professionally; only the recent memory of Willy, as bouncy as a squash ball and as wholesome as her own proverbial blueberry pie, relegated the woman to the second division.

‘Thank you.’ She fumbled his identification, like the Tsarina accepting something rather nasty from a flea-ridden moujik, which she had to take but would have preferred not to look at before she passed it to someone else. ‘Why were you sorry?’

‘Why was I—?’ Now he was behaving like a moujik, damn it! ‘I was captivated by your beautiful house, actually—craning my neck like a tourist, when I should have been knocking on your door, Mrs Audley.’

‘I see.’ She waved his identification card briefly and very closely Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State in front of her face, but then smiled at him, displaying fetching dimples. ‘It is rather beautiful, isn’t it? We’re terribly lucky to live in it, David and I.’

‘But I didn’t understand it.’ Tom knew when he was on a winner.

With some women it would be their children—or their diamonds, or their dogs, or the expertise of their dress- maker. But with this one it was her home.

Nikolai Andrievich Panin, KGB and all the way back to the NKVD

of the 1940s, he thought: that was as far back as he wanted to go.