A Prospect of Vengeance

'Not aloud I don't — no! But I think . . . if I was Audley . . . I might be remembering the banquet scene in that play the actors don't like naming — eh?'

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'You're sure you've got it right, Jen — ?'

'Don't be a bore, Ian. Of course I've got it right. I was listening to them.'

'To whom?'

'To these two men. And don't ask me who they were, because I don't know — yet.'

'They didn't introduce themselves to you?'

'Now you're being thick. They weren't talking to me. I overheard them. And the play's 'Macbeth', of course — '

'Oh? Not 'Hamlet', then?'

'Not— what?'

'You overheard them. But I can't think they wouldn't have noticed you. Because you're quite noticeable, Miss Fielding-ffulke. So presumably you were hiding behind some arras, like Polonius in 'Hamlet'. That's all.'

I see. So now you're being clever. So at least you're awake . . . Well, for your information, I was partly behind an arras, actually. Or a curtain, to be exact. . . And Victor Pollard and Nigel Gaitch were regaling me with inane Palace gossip about Charles and Di, which I really didn't want to know, but which they thought was just up my street. So I stopped listening to them . . . and there must be some sort of acoustic trick just there, because of the alcove there, and the curtain — I don't damn well know. All I know is what I heard. And it's 'Macbeth' — the one the actors won't ever mention. And the banquet scene, too. And you dummy2

know what that's about, do you, Ian?'

'Yes — '

' It's about a murder that's gone wrong, is what it's about — '

So maybe Jenny was right. For certainly Jenny was clever, and she was very often as lucky as she was clever, which was an unbeatable alliance.

But that still left them with the Unnamed Play expert, who had been unlucky, as well as indiscreet, beside the curtain at the embassy party; he sounded clever too, and maliciously so perhaps. But just how clever had he been with that throwaway Macbeth reference?

Just generally clever, with Macbeth's hired murderer reporting back on the bodged killing —

— Is he dispacht?

— My lord, his throat is cut; that I did for him.

Or exactly clever, with Philip Masson as well as Audley in mind, after Banquo's grisly ghost had broken up a pleasant dinner —

— the time has been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would dummy2

die,

And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools

Was that it?

Had Banquo/Masson risen again, in order that Jenny Fielding and Ian Robinson should push David Audley from his stool — ?

Well . . . Jenny Fielding's castle was now just across the wet road, and he could hear no footsteps behind him, only his old tutor's warning against preconceived ideas which fitted so well that one bought them too easily, without feeling the quality of the shoddy material.

The road was safe, anyway — as safe as suburban East Berlin on a wet Sunday, never mind Hampstead; and he was probably as unfollowed here and now as he had been there and then — and Jenny could have simply heard two malicious Civil Service tongues chatting imaginative gossip

—

He skipped the last few yards, from the road and across the glistening pavement, to the refuge of the flat's entrance, and stabbed the bell with a sense of anti-climax, feeling foolish because he was simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

Because, if Jenny and Buller were right, it might well be that dummy2

they didn't even consider him worth following —

'Yes?' The cool, disembodied voice was haughtiest Jenny.

'It's me. Who did you think it was?' He heard his own voice too late, as squeakiest Ian.

'Are you alone? Or already in durance vile, with the cuffs on and a gun at your back?' Now she was stage- Jenny, making fun of all the painted devils of his imagination.