A Prospect of Vengeance

'So he got there with the Police, anyway.' Buller nodded. 'An'

as they were hardly there before him, an' they didn't know who the hell he was ... at first they didn't stop him — when he pushed his way in.'

That was also the old style: look like you belong there—

plainclothes policeman, special branch man, doctor (serious-faced, bag-in-hand if you can find a bag) — John Tully always dummy2

simply looked like himself, and waved an impressively embossed card with his photograph on it, which testified that he was a Count of the Holy Roman Empire; and that, with his superior manner, had passed him into all sorts of unlikely places. And, when it came to unlikely places, Thornervaulx Abbey —

He stopped in mid-thought as he realized simultaneously that Reg Buller was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak, and that he'd been following the wrong line of thought, from the wrong angle — Buller's Terry's angle. And Buller had told him all he needed to know about Terry, of course —

And then it was easy —

'It wasn't an ambush, of course — of course!' All the thrust of the newspaper stories had been that O'Leary had been

'cornered' — like the 'Mad Dog' he was: Reg's favourite newspaper had started its subordinate clause with that word, and two of the quality papers had used the word 'ambush' in their headlines. But siren-shrieking police cars coming from afar didn't attend ambushes. They would already have been there, or nearby, unmarked and tucked away unobtrusively.

'Right.' Buller leered at him for an instant, then raised Ian's empty glass for the barmaid to see, and then came back to him. 'Or, rather . . . wrong.'

'Wrong?' He covered his own beer with his hand to stop her getting the wrong idea.

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'It was an ambush all right.' Buller reached across him to surrender his glass for refilling. 'But it was O'Leary who was doing the ambushing, not Audley's lot.'

This time it was stronger than hypothesis. But it was still no better than circumstantial. And good old-fashioned incompetence could yet turn those circumstantial elements on their head. 'What makes you so sure?'

Buller waited until his glass was returned to him. 'Terry talked to someone there — there's two or three houses by the ruins. One of 'em was the custodian's . . . Ministry of Works, or National Trust, or whatever it was then. An' he said there was a police car parked in the car park, large as life, on the forecourt, where the coaches and the day-trippers off-load —

blue light on the top, day-glow orange-and-red strip along the side — from midday onwards. Plus other cars, that looked official. Not toufist cars, anyway . . . apart from the fact it was a November day — November 11 to be exact. . . An'

that was why old Terry was round there: he was goin' to interview this CND Vicar, who was saying he wasn't goin' to encourage the British Legion in their militaristic practices —

huh!' Reg Buller tossed his head derisively. ' Anyway ... it was a wet November Saturday — it 'ud been pissing with rain earlier, but it was down to a fine drizzle when Terry comes on the scene, just behind a couple of police cars. And there were several big home matches that weekend, too. So there weren't any tourists sight-seeing, to complicate matters.'

That was typical Buller understatement, after he had just dummy2

enormously complicated what had seemed before to be a neatly open-and-shut episode of counter-intelligence anti-terrorist operations.

'Except the one girl, who was killed.' All this made the poor little thing's death even more poignant: her presence there, late in the afternoon on a wet November day, had been against the odds; and maybe the only target O'Leary had seen when he had failed to find his proper target for the second time in succession. But that raised a much more important question. 'So . . . who was he after, Reg — O'Leary — ?' He frowned at Buller, as the more important question suddenly offered an answer which was dangerous because it was also much too quick, much too simple.

'Yes.' Buller had been there before him, and had also seen the same dangers. 'If it was Audley he was going for — if Audley was at the university, just before . . .' He cocked his head.

And then straightened it to get at his beer. And then came back to Ian. 'A bit too easy — eh?'

Ian drank the last of his own beer. All this was following on their established technique: in any investigation, one had to start somewhere.

Sometimes it was easy, and one started at the beginning. But more often than not there was no clear beginning: the more one researched, the further back the beginning went, in that first month's careless gadarene rush at the subject, open-minded. And out of that their line would come (usually out of Jenny's greater gathering of fact, and rumour, and fiction . . .

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and his own final interpretation of all that).

'What d'you think, Reg?' He mustn't let the man go off the boil.

'I dunno . . .' Buller stared down into his glass. 'But . . . even without that bugger Masson ... we could 'ave a good one 'ere, y'know . . .'

That was another sign: Reg only dropped all his aitches either deliberately or in extremis with clients — at least, apart from when he also deliberately did so to annoy John Tully.

'A good one?'

'Aye. An' thass the truth.' Buller slurred again. 'We do O'Leary . . . and maybe we've got O'Leary gunning for Audley, an' Audley gunning for O'Leary — an' that's bloody good.' He cocked an eye at Ian again. 'But if we add Masson to it ...