A Prospect of Vengeance

Jenny shaded her eyes and stared.

'”The Greater Arapile'.' The binoculars came up again.

'That's where the French were, when the battle started in 1812. And the Duke of Wellington came along behind us, from the 'Lesser Arapile' to the village. He must have had his lunch just about where we left the car: that was when he saw they'd over-extended their line of march, and threw his chicken leg over his shoulder and said 'That will do!' So the story goes, anyway.'

Either it was the glare, or perhaps she needed glasses, but she couldn't see a damn thing in the desolate parched landscape. 'I really don't need to know about the battle — do I, darling?'

'It's an interesting battle.' He spoke distantly, as though to a child. 'When people think of Wellington they think of dummy2

Waterloo . . . like, when they think of Nelson, it's Trafalgar . . . But Nelson's finest victory was the Nile — or maybe it was at St Vincent that he really showed what he was made of ... So this was maybe Wellington's 'finest hour' . . .

ye-ess: ' That will do!''

Jenny squinted hopelessly at a blur of boring fields and boring rocks, and knew that it wasn't her own finest hour.

Or, anyway, not yet. 'I didn't know it was the Duke of Wellington we were interested in, darling. I thought it was David Audley.'

'We could do a book on Spain instead, you know.' The new Ian was impervious to sarcasm. 'All those people on holiday on the Costa Blanca, and the Costa Brava . . . and now Spain in the Common Market. And the ETA link with the IRA . . .

And we could take the history all the way from the Black Prince, and the War of the Spanish Succession, and Wellington . . . and the Civil War, with the International Brigades — ' The binoculars went down, and then up again '

— and the phenomenon of peaceful transition from fascism to democracy ... I met a woman recently who is an expert on Spanish economic development, and what she had to say was extremely interesting — ahh!'

The new Ian was also becoming sassy in pushing alternative projects to the one which mattered to her. Although the one plus-factor was that at least he seemed for a moment to have forgotten Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon, alias Marilyn Francis, about whom he had obsessively taxed poor Reg Buller all the dummy2

way from London to Madrid to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Reg Buller — ? The thought of Reg (and of Reg complaining about Spanish beer, even more vociferously than about Spanish food) momentarily diverted her: in Spain Reg Buller was much less of an asset than in London; he seemed somehow to have withdrawn into himself, as though he no longer approved of what they were doing in seeking out Audley; although it couldn't be Audley whom he was worrying about — more likely he was torn between self-preservation and his duty to his paymasters on the one hand, and a sneaking identification with Paul Mitchell, their new suspect, on the other hand — could that be it?

''Ahh'?' It probably was it. Because Reg and the Police Force had parted company long ago not so much because of his drinking (that would have been no great sin, the way he held it) as because of his sneaking sympathy for underdogs and minor villains versus authority. But it was still an added burden now, when Ian had gone funny on her too. 'What is it, darling?'

'I think I've spotted the wife.' He concentrated on the lower part of the plateau.

'Where?' Reg Buller was all the back-up they had, somewhere behind them in the car, and probably drinking already from his hip-flask. But Ian was her immediate problem.

'Or it may be the daughter . . . They're both tall and thin and blonde . . . But what on earth is she doing — ?' He dummy2

concentrated for another moment. Then he lowered the binoculars and pointed. 'Just down there, left of the car — in the ploughed field . . . Come on, Jen — let's get going.'

'Hold on.' It was still a long and uncomfortable walk to where he was pointing and she felt mutinous. 'Why are we walking all this way?'

'Eh?' The bloody binoculars came up again. 'I told you, Jen: I want to think a bit. And I also want to look at the battlefield.'

'You want to — ?' She bit off her anger, and looked round instead to help her count to ten: it was (she could see at a glance) a most excellent and absolute, and suitable and tailor-made . . . battlefield: apart from the modern railway-line which ran diagonally through the valley between the two rocky plateaux, with a couple of grotty station-buildings halfway along it in the middle of the open fields, and that single even grottier hut where Audley's car was parked, there was absolutely nothing to be seen. So, once upon a time, the British and the French could have killed each other in their thousands quite happily, without inconveniencing anyone or damaging anything of value. But that 1812 suitability still didn't answer the question. 'Why do you have to do that, Ian darling?'

'I don't have to. But I want to.' Now he was studying a more distant ridge to the right of the Greater Arapile. 'It's what Audley's doing today, Jen. I told you in the car — remember?'

What Jenny chiefly remembered from the short journey out dummy2

of Salamanca was that he had been irritatingly masterful and matter-of-fact and decisive. But then he had been like that for the last thirty-six hours, ever since Reg Buller had sold them his theory about Paul Mitchell and that wretched woman.

'So what?' What cautioned her was that he had also been efficient with it, in coaxing information about David Audley's whereabouts from a series of slightly bewildered Spaniards while she had stood on the sidelines like an idiot girlfriend whose main function was to stare at the ceiling of a series of bedrooms.

'I told you, Jen.' Now he wasn't so much masterful as quite damnably long-suffering. 'The daughter prattled to that man the receptionist found for us in the hotel after we checked in