For the Good of the State

the Good of the State remembered the Special Branch man. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll come back to you. But we’ll want an escort vehicle—‘

‘And a car for my wife,’ said Audley. ‘I don’t want her here tonight.’

‘Right—that too.’ Tom nodded the Special Branch man out of the room before turning back to Faith Audley. But then he also remembered Jaggard. ‘Hullo?’ There really wasn’t anything else that he wanted to say to Jaggard, the bugger seemed so remarkably laid-back in the circumstances of their high-velocity bullet. ‘I’ll call you again when I’m free.’

‘Don’t bother, Tom. I’ve got the general picture well enough. You just watch over Audley and his old friend, that’s all. Just get Audley to the rendezvous first—then I want to know what he gets up to—where he’s going, and who he’s talking to. And preferably in advance—do you understand that?’

‘Yes.’ It took no effort to slam the phone down. Come back Beirut… but, most of all, where are you now, Willy? ‘I’m sorry, Faith—’

‘No.’ Some of the fire seemed to have gone out of her, damped down under the fine drenching spray of cruel reality. ‘I can see that I’m getting in the way of more pressing matters.’ She gave her husband a weary little smile. ‘There’s a right time for being difficult, and this isn’t it.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’ll go quietly, Sir Thomas—in fact, I’ll just go and pack my toothbrush. All right?’

‘No.’ It was working out so well that Tom was almost ashamed.

‘What I meant was that some fool has got his lines crossed—and I Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State am the fool. So your husband was really just protecting me.’ He knew that he mustn’t look at Audley, for fear that she might do the same. ‘The bullet was for me, Mrs Audley, you see. Not for him.’

‘What—?’ The lie caught her in the act of turning away. But that, most annoyingly, left her half-facing her husband. ‘David—?’

‘Ahh…’ A lifetime of dissimulation had greased the big man’s mental reflexes. ‘Well… to be fair, that’s for the experts to say, Tom.’

‘It was for me, David.’ He could only admire the crafty way Audley had fixed the lie, with so little warning. ‘But… you understand, Mrs Audley—Faith… that I can’t tell you what I usually do. But, in any case, I’m not doing it now—’ True, Tom Arkenshaw, you lying bastard! But what could he say next ‘—so I trust it won’t happen again—’ Not good enough! He could see that in her face ‘—but I’ll keep an eye on him now, I promise you, anyway.’ True again! he thought. But what a fearful promise! But, for better or worse, it was made now. And that sort of promise couldn’t be unmade, which was worst of all.

‘Huh!’ Audley chuckled obscenely. ‘Just keep away from me—

that’s all!’

‘ David! ’ She gave him a broken look. ‘You look after yourself too, Sir Thomas.’ She drew a breath. ‘I have to believe that my husband is indestructible.’ She took another breath. ‘I’ll go and find my toothbrush, anyway.’

Tom watched her depart, chin up.

‘I shall get hell in due course,’ murmured Audley. ‘But, in the Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State meantime—’

‘No!’ All Tom wanted to do was to think in peace for a moment, before they all came back to him again: to think about what Jaggard had said, and hadn’t said; and about what Harvey had said, and had hinted at; and about Audley too; and maybe even about Mamusia. ‘You just go and pack your toothbrush too, David. We can talk in the car—okay?’

At first Audley didn’t reply. Then, when he did, he sounded as though his gratitude was already being stretched. ‘I was only going to thank you for that little white lie. But…’ he shrugged ‘… if that’s the way you want it, you’re the boss.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘For the time being, anyway.’

Tom waited for a moment, then turned back to the huge cluttered desk, staring for another moment at the red phone among the tower-blocks of books and magazines and buff folders, and the scatter of notes and notebooks and photo-copied newspaper cuttings, which together left no square inch of its surface free.

Jaggard had not really been surprised, he decided—

Places in the books—and in the magazines—were liberally reminded with numerous slips of differently coloured paper, pale pink and green and blue; and there were passages marked in the newspaper cuttings too, Audley- interest-stained with broad soft-felt pen-ink of similar colours, like cross-references.

It was always hard to tell for sure on the phone, a practised liar always had the edge on the phone—he could deceive anyone except Mamusia on the phone ~

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State The whole room was full of books: books shelved from floor to ceiling of every wall, books crammed between the shelves laterally where there was room, books in ranks and piles on the floor; there was only that one little dark gap behind the high-backed oak chair, to the right of the door, where that tall grandfather clock ticked away now in the silence like a monstrous death watch beetle, which had no books, apart from the leaded windows with their fringes of wisteria.

So… because he had already decided that Jaggard had not told him everything, or even half of it… that was a subjective conclusion

—

He turned back to the desk. There were books on it which didn’t fit among their fellows—or, even more, among the pink-stained names in the topmost cuttings from a wide range of Soviet and American specialist publications: Chebrikov from the Politburo, and Aliev, from the KGB… and the geriatric Lomako, who was (wasn’t he?) a survivor from the prehistoric 1940s… and…

Shevardnadze— who the hell was he? But there was that bastard Shkiriatov, anyway, from his own recent Syrian experience—

So this was what Audley was doing right now: trying to pick this year’s Kremlin Grand National winners—or at least fix the odds!