A Prospect of Vengeance

what?' She zeroed in on Reg Buller. 'Murder, for a start?'

Buller drank without answering, keeping his counsel dry as an infantryman's powder.

Tully sipped his sherry, and from the look on his face either approved of its dryness or was thinking of his fees. 'Treason, for choice, Miss Fielding. With murder in a chief supporting role, perhaps — ?' Then (as before) he remembered Ian. ' Pro bono publico, of course . . . But it isn't Masson who is primarily interesting, interesting though he undoubtedly is ...

even very interesting, if I may say so.' He smiled his thinnest, driest-sherry smile at Jenny. 'But Audley is the one who matters.'

'Why do you say that, John?' Jenny watched him over her glass.

'Don't you agree?'

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'Back in '78-'79?' She accepted the challenge casually.

'Whenever it was, anyway . . . Philip Masson was more influential than Audley — at least, potentially, anyway.'

'Was he?' He let her steel rasp down his blade. Either, they had already rehearsed this for his benefit, thought Ian — or, if they hadn't, then they were manoeuvring to find out how much the other knew. 'I would have thought that was . . .

arguable, at the least?'

Jenny shrugged, and refilled her glass: since Tully was their employee now, at his usual rate, she was not minded to play games with him, the gesture implied. 'Philip Masson's dead and Audley's alive.'

'A very proper conclusion.' Because he had picked up her signal, Tully agreed with her. But because he was Tully he couldn't resist talking down to her. ' However, dead, in precise and gruesome detail, is of no interest, now that Mr Buller has pronounced on it.' He hardly glanced at Buller.

'And by whomsoever dead — by whose actual hand . . . that is merely a police matter. And I think it exceedingly unlikely that they will ever put their cuffs on that particular hand . . .

And, if they can't then we won't.' He only had eyes for Jenny now, in proclaiming his limitations. 'But it won't have been Audley, anyway.'

'Why not?' The question came, surprisingly, from Buller —

perhaps because the emptiness of his glass made him irritable.

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'Why not?' This time Tully gave Buller his full attention. And although there was no surprise in his repetition of the question, there was a matching hint of irritation. 'I hope you haven't exceeded your brief, Mr Buller.'

'Ah! My brief . . .' Buller sucked in his cheeks slightly, and gave Tully back scrutiny for scrutiny, like a man who knows his rights as well as his place. 'No, I wouldn't say that, Johnny — no.'

'No?' Tully smiled suddenly, almost proprietorially. But then, of course, each of them knew his man, Ian reminded himself: the Tully-Buller relationship went back a long way, to the days when neither of them was engaged in his present avocation. 'Then . . . what would you say?'

For a moment Ian was tempted to suspect that he might be a potential client treated to a piece of rehearsed dialogue, to which Buller's earlier confidences had been a mere prologue.

But now that he'd as good as taken Jenny's hook (and theirs) such dramatics were hardly necessary; and Buller's thoughtful expression and elongated silence served to remind him of the watchers in the rain outside.

'What exactly was your brief, Mr Buller — ' Jenny cracked first ' — your brief, Reg — ?'

Buller kept both bloodshot eyes on Tully for another five seconds'-worth of silence before turning to her, as though the sound of her voice had had to travel across some dummy2

unimaginable distance before it had reached him. 'Just like always, madam — Miss Fielding: I take off my boot, an' then my sock ... an' I dip my big toe in the water, to test the temperature.' He gave her his ex-policeman's smile of false encouragement. 'An' of course, I do all that behind some convenient bush, so no joker can swipe my boot when I'm not looking. As a precaution, like.'

'I see.' Even when a client, Jenny was patient in the face of such stone-wailing. 'And how was the hot water, then — in that pond, where Philip Masson didn't drown . . . which you didn't actually see, you said — ?'

'Warm, Miss Fielding.' Buller accepted the sharp points of her little claws approvingly, as though not being punctured would have disappointed him.

'Warm.' Jenny had drawn blood from harder stones than Reg Buller. 'Meaning . . . warm-cooling-down? Or warm-hotting-up, Reg?'

Buller liked that too — her acceptance of his imagery. But that, by some special alchemy, was the effect she always had, even on the most unregenerate chauvinist-pig, one way or another, sooner or later. 'It may not warm up much down there, now. It could be just the place where he finished up . . .' He shrugged. 'He didn't live there. He may not even have died there.'

'But — ?' She picked up the vibration instantly.

'Somebody planted him there. So somebody knew it was dummy2

there — that's a fair bet.' Another shrug. 'All these years . . .

that may be hard to pin down usefully. But if I was running the Incident Room I'd be waiting for that to register on the computer, anyway.' Nod. 'Because, although that isn't so very far from London there, it's still country — deep country . . .

Or, it was then. And it's amazing what long memories they have, the country-folk. Like, I told you: there was this tale about the soldier who went missing in the war . . . And not Dr David Audley's