A New Kind of War

‘No sir.’ De Souza stood his ground. ‘Devenish is a good man.’

‘Tcha! I know he’s a good man – I chose him. But he’s also a whisperer. And Alec McCorquodale has complained about him.’

‘He also speaks tolerable German, sir. We need him.’

‘Huh! It’s because he speaks German that he’s up to no good!’

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Colbourne waved the sponge ‘ – Oh, all right –post someone else.

They’re all corrupt, so anyone will do.’ He looked at Fred suddenly. ‘Lydia Ferguson nee Armstrong – your mother’s sister?’

He sniffed. ‘A decent, respectable woman . . . but married to a wastrel husband. I handled her divorce. A dirty business, divorce always is. Give me a good murder any day.’ He invited Fred into his room with his sponge. ‘Come in, Freddie, come in!’

Fred thought: Audley was bloody-right!

And then he thought: If I have Audley to thank for this posting ... or whoever it may be . . . then Colonel Colbourne may soon have another murderer to defend before long, by Christ!

2

‘Now then, Freddie – ’ The Colonel turned his back on them as he spoke, and stepped into a battered hip-bath ‘ –if you’ll allow me to complete my ablutions, eh?’ He bent down to dunk his sponge in the water.

‘Yes, sir.’ Faced with his commanding officer’s white buttocks, Fred chose to study the room instead, although there was little enough to study: it was much the same as the adjutant’s office, with its single unnaturally high-up latticed window, and apart from the hip-bath its sole contents consisted of a camp-bed with the Colonel’s clothing neatly laid out on it, and a battered metal trunk on which a pressure-lamp hissed away softly. So the Colonel dummy4

clearly wasn’t a believer in creature comforts, he thought disconsolately.

‘So you’re a friend of young Audley’s – is that the case?’ The Colonel gyrated under a cascade of water squeezed from his sponge.

‘No, sir.’ That was not the case in more senses than one at this precise moment. ‘He was at school with my younger brother, I believe.’

‘Mmmm. But you are acquainted with him, are you not?’ The Colonel stepped out of the hip-bath on to the cold stone floor without a hint of hesitation, into a large puddle which he must have left when he’d gone to investigate the whisperers outside his door.

‘I have met him once.’ The atmosphere in the room was cold and dank, to match its musty, unoccupied smell. And Fred suspected that it was a cold bath which the Colonel was enjoying so inhumanly.

‘Just once?’ The Colonel pointed to the camp-bed. ‘Would you be so good as to hand me that towel?’

‘Yes.’ The towel was rough as sandpaper.

‘In Greece? Thank you.’ The Colonel began to towel himself vigorously. ‘In Greece?’

‘Yes.’ If, as Driver Hewitt and the Colonel himself had suggested, Colonel Colbourne had practised law before the war, then this was a cross-examination, he began to suspect. But why?

‘Good.’ The Colonel nodded in de Souza’s direction. ‘Any friend of young Audley’s might be one too many for us – eh, Amos?’

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For a moment de Souza didn’t answer. ‘Sir?’ He paused for a second, almost as though he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Captain Audley does his job well, sir. He’s just somewhat younger than the rest of us, that’s all.’

‘Huh!’ Colbourne folded his towel carefully and placed it on the edge of his hip-bath. ‘But you are a friend of Colonel Michaelides, are you not?’

The question came out of the gloom unexpectedly, just as Fred was watching the towel slide down the side of the bath into the water.

‘Sir – ? Yes ... I am a friend of Colonel Michaelides.’ It was a cross-examination. But the cross-examiner knew too-damn-many answers to his questions already. So it was time to have all his wits around him. And his wits’ first requirement was that he must counter-question. ‘Are you a friend of Colonel Michaelides, sir?’

‘Eh?’ The question took the Colonel off-balance.

‘I said . . . are you a friend of Colonel Michaelides, sir?’ It was easier to study his naked commanding officer now that he was neither standing in the ill-lit doorway nor presenting his arse and twisting under his sponge: the upwards-directed light distorted his features, but he had a good, well-muscled hairy body – light-heavyweight . . . with the familiar distribution of tanned and untanned skin which Fred had observed among his own men in Italy and Greece, before they had had time to sunbathe peacefully.

So that meant the Colonel had put in six years of open-air living, but hadn’t enjoyed any Mediterranean service in recent months, to spread that sunburn uniformly.

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Major de Souza gave a little dry cough. ‘They’ll be waiting for us in the mess, sir ... quite soon.’

‘Yes.’ The Colonel continued to stare at Fred. ‘Ah . . . you go on, Amos.’

‘Sir?’

‘I said . . .’ The continued stare began to worry Fred, as it occurred to him that he had unwisely crossed swords with an expert ‘. . . you heard me, Amos. Go on!’

‘Yes.’ But de Souza didn’t move. ‘I was going to introduce . . .

Freddie ... to the rest of them. That’s all.’

Fred suddenly knew perfectly what was happening. Adjutants were usually creatures of colonels, quite