A Prospect of Vengeance

Maybe she had had one glass too many. 'I see. And high-powered with it. But not as high-powered as your father, eh?'

She frowned at him. 'What?'

'I was always taught there was only one God.' It was odd to speak so lightly when one meant what one said. 'So ... like St Peter, say? Or St Paul — he was rather high-powered.'

She stared at him for a moment, then made a face. 'Very dummy2

clever.' Then the face became serious. 'Maybe a bit of both of them, actually. Although Daddy just called him 'Fred', as I remember. When I met him.'

''Fred'?' At least this wasn't one of her unacknowledged, unnamed sources, anyway. 'I don't think there is a 'St Fred'

in the calendar of saints. But never mind . . . You met this

'Fred' — ' It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what Fred had to do with Audley. But then he looked directly into her eyes and caught himself just in time, knowing that he had been wrong just a minute before.

'Yes, I did.' The eyes were stony, not stoned. 'I was eighteen

— I was just going up to college. And he frightened me.'

'Frightened you?' It was so unexpected that he repeated the words. 'How?'

'He quizzed me. No — he interrogated me, more like . . .

What I thought, what I was going to do ... at Oxford, after Oxford . . . Why I thought what I thought — why I was going to do what . . . what I thought I was going to do.' She stared at him. 'He really took me apart. It was quite frightening.'

From her that was also quite an admission. Because there wasn't much that frightened Jenny Fielding-ffulke. Or, anyway, nothing that wore trousers. And there was also something else that didn't fit. 'Your father didn't stop him

— ?'

'Daddy had a phone-call. He told me to entertain his guest —

Mummy was at one of her meetings.' Her eyes glazed slightly, dummy2

as though she was no longer looking at him. Then they focused on him again. 'He was sharp — not interrogated, more like dissected: I felt like a poor bloody frog in a biology practical.'

'Fred' had been nothing if not memorable. And a faint whiff of her original fear travelled across the years in her imagery.

'When Daddy came back ... he said — he said, not Daddy —

'We've had a most interesting chat, Jennifer and I'.' She cocked her head slightly. 'And then the bastard told Daddy what a clever daughter he'd sired, and bullshitted him so that I couldn't decently have hysterics, or burst into tears ... In fact, he even gave me his card, and told me that if I didn't want to go on with my biochemistry when I'd graduated then I could always come to him for a job. And poor old Daddy positively glowed.' She sniffed. ' Fat chance!'

It was getting more interesting by the second — just as she'd promised it would do, although in another context. 'So what did you do?'

She sniffed again. 'I couldn't say anything then — now, could I? Not to Daddy — not without appearing to be a wimp, anyway.'

'But. . . what was on the card, Jen?'

'God — I don't know! I went to the loo, and had a good cry —

and tore it up, and flushed it down the pan — ' She stopped abruptly. ' Clinton, though — that was the name: Frederick Joseph Clinton.' Now she looked at him. ' Sir Frederick dummy2

Clinton — ?'

That rang a bell from somewhere. But he couldn't place it.

But ... the way she was looking at him, she expected him to place it. 'Clinton?'

'Yes.' She nodded. 'I found him in an old Who's Who, but there wasn't much about him.' She drained the last dregs of her Haut-Brion. 'He retired from the army as a brigadier in

'47 — no mention of any regiment. . . But the DSO was from 1940, Daddy said. So that fits in with a book he wrote, about Dunkirk, when we ran away from the Germans, and made a great victory of it.' She almost banged her glass down. 'And he got his 'K' in '58, when he was supposed to be a permanent something-or-other in the Home Office — or one of the other ministries they had then, before it was the Ministry of Defence. But, of course, it's just like Audley — all flumdiddle.'

Dunkirk, of course: there had been that very curious book on Dunkirk, way back . . . with all sorts of elliptical references to high policy, both British and German, which the military historians had taken with a pinch of salt; he had bought a copy in a second-hand shop in Charing Cross Road as a schoolboy, for his grandfather (who had been there) because it had been signed by the author, with a great flourish (or, rather, because it had been dead-cheap, anyway). ' The Dunkirk Miracle — of course!'

'What?' She frowned at him again.

The book he wrote — The Dunkirk Miracle, Jen. But . . . how dummy2