The Memory Trap

more than ever like the desperate long-shot it had always been, with the temperature of Anglo-Israeli intelligence relations so chilly these days.

'Yes — no! Hold on — slow down!' Where there had been nobody on the last circuit, there was now a young man loitering, although he looked far too young to be 'Mr Lee.'

But then everyone was young now — not just police constables but police superintendents and the Mr Lees of this world. 'Stop here, please.'

The Rolls drew up with its usual silent good manners. 'Shall I come back, sir?'

'Ah . . .' Audley felt crumpled and disreputable in his creased suit and three-day shirt: all he could hope for, if anyone was peeking through their curtains on the other side of the street, was that he might pass for an eccentric millionaire taking his morning constitutional. 'Yes.' Damn Butler! Damn India —

and damn Berlin and Capri, most of all! 'Ten minutes — '

Damn the whole bloody-lot-of-them!' — and then keep coming round. Right?'

The Rolls slid away, as though powered by thought rather than anything so vulgar as an internal-combustion engine, and the London October-chill hit him immediately. So ... he dummy1

was grasping at a straw, then. But there was a newspaper kiosk at the other end of the crescent of trees. So he would grasp the straw nonchalantly, as though he had all the time in the world, even though he suspected he'd already lost the game, and was into injury-time.

' Daily Telegraph, please.' For a moment he was embarrassed then, in the sudden knowledge that he had no Queen's coinage in his pocket, having nearly had no lire to purchase his Villa Jovis ticket. But then he thought again, re-estimating the odds that there might yet be some of the Queen's coins among the foreign detritus in his palm. 'How much is that — ?'

The old woman in the kiosk goggled at him for an instant, not so much as at an eccentric millionaire as at an idiot, while keeping tight hold of the Daily Telegraph she'd been about to surrender.

Audley squinted at his small change. 'Yes — ?'

'Ere — ' On second thought, she decided that he was a Martian who had made his historic landfall inadequately prepared; but, if she could, she would sell him a paper; so she leaned across to finger his coins. 'Thirty-p . . . that's twenty — that's forty —' she pinched the appropriate coins' —

an' eight-p change — right?'

'Right.' Audley accepted his Telegraph gratefully. When it came to newspapers, he knew his business in content, if not in price: the subs on the Telegraph weren't into clever design dummy1

on the news pages, even under the new Max Hastings editorial management; but they still picked up all those unconsidered trifles of news, local and international, for their fillers —

He opened the paper up. (Let the very-young-man wait — if he was a Mossad very-young-man he still had three minutes of waiting-time!) Cuccaro's cover story was just the sort the Telegraph liked —

Virus kills tiger

That wasn't it ... even though it was a vintage Telegraph heading —

Pushchair snatch

foiled by nannie

Another good one. But it was not the one he wanted. He turned the page to foreign news —

Mafia shoot-out

on holiday isle —

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Elizabeth's handsome captain had done his work well, even allowing for all his advantages —

A man fell to his death and two more were shot in a Mafia-style execution on the holiday island of Capri yesterday, visited by thousands of British tourists every year —

The grammar was maybe a bit rocky. But the facts were nearly right, as reported, even though absolutely wrong —

Holiday-makers scattered as gangsters opened fire on their rivals without warning —

That was also pretty close to the facts, give-or-take the truth—

The Italian police have taken a fourth man into custody, who is believed to have taken part in the shoot-out. A fifth man and a woman are also helping the police with their inquiries —

Even that was good, in its acceptance of what any uncontrollable eye-witnesses might have seen in the aftermath, when half of Capri had appeared out of nowhere, even before Cuccaro had arrived with Paul and Elizabeth, and the situation had become decidedly messy.

He re-folded his Telegraph quickly and untidily, shivering slightly as he set out for General Abercrombie's statue —

even remembering, as he did so, why Jack Butler so admired the old soldier —

The trees above were dripping early-morning moisture, and the pavement was pock-marked by all sorts of filth —pigeon-dummy1

shit and dog-shit, and general all-sorts-of-litter-lout shit, from take-away plastic containers to beer-cans and last night's evening newspapers. And the need to avoid this different mess took his attention until he reached the corner of the gardens, where the old General stood, sword-in-hand and bare-headed, looking blindly out over the