The Memory Trap

Warmth and more pronounced wood-smoke greeted him.

The curtains and the chair-covers and the carpet were different, but the room and the major things in it were the same.

'Have you got a dog?' In spite of himself, he couldn't resist the question.

'Yes.' She stared at him, for a fraction of a second incredulously, but then with a slow smile. 'So it is true, then.'

'What's true?'

'He said you'd come. Would you like a drink?'

What he would like, he thought, was to follow up that cooking smell: it promised something he hadn't had for more days than he cared to think about, never mind since the day dummy1

before yesterday: a good square English home-cooked dinner

— preferably with cabbage. 'Thank you. A very small scotch?'

In the full light of her sitting-room he could study her for the first — or, more accurately, the second time. 'What's true, Mrs Kenyon?'

She poured two very small scotches and handed one of them to him. The years, he thought, had been kind and not-kind to her: she still had her figure and the natural grace to go with it. But fifteen Cotswold winters, at least some of which must have been lavished on her dying husband (and the rest of which had presumably been wasted on loneliness and good works? But now he was making pictures!) . . . those fifteen winters had added Cotswold grey to her.

'He's not here at the moment, Dr Audley,' she said simply.

'No?' He took comfort from the lack of emphasis on 'here'.

'But not too far away, I hope?'

She considered him and his question together across her small untouched scotch. 'You really are alone, Dr Audley?'

'You called me 'David' once — after Peter had introduced me, Mrs Kenyon. And I then called you 'Sophie' over lunch, I remember.'

The smile, slow as before but gentler for the memory, returned. 'And what did we have for lunch . . . when we were

'David' and 'Sophie' . . . David?'

'I don't remember. Salad, was it?'

'So you're not perfect!' She nodded, nevertheless.

dummy1

She was not an enemy. But she was something much more worrying than that to a man running out of time. 'Not quite perfect. But alone.' He felt time at his back. 'I do need to see him very badly, though. And the longer you delay our meeting, the less certain I can be that either of us will be able to stay out of trouble.'

She raised an eyebrow. 'What sort of trouble?'

It was always the same: to get more he had to give more. 'He told you what happened on Capri, did he?'

The eyebrow came down. 'Yes. But he doesn't know why it happened, he also told me.'

'He thinks he doesn't, perhaps.' He shook his head at her.

'But he does.'

She stared at him for another over-long moment. 'What he thinks ... is that you are a very dangerous man, David. You were in the old days. And you still are.'

Audley sighed. It was not unreasonable on Peter Richardson's part that he should think that — however unjustly. 'I don't know about dangerous. More like endangered, I would say.'

Another long stare. But for that ailing husband and her Catholic scruples she would have been Peter Richardson's woman long ago, not just his friend and his friend's wife. So now she was more than all of that.

'But you get people killed.' It was a statement, not an accusation.

dummy1

He had to correct it, nevertheless. 'When I make mistakes, people get killed sometimes. Peter was a soldier — he should understand that.' He felt the iron entering his soul. 'And now, if I don't get to talk to him very soon, more people are going to get killed.' He could almost taste the iron: it was because, if he let himself be, he was tired as well as hungry. 'Almost certainly, whatever we do, I think that more people are going to get killed. But it may be within our power . . . how many.

Or whether they're the innocent ones or the guilty.'

She didn't reply. But this time she nodded, and then reached down into the hearth. Audley watched her as she lit a candle with a thin wooden spill and placed the brass candlestick on the ledge of a tiny window to the right of the stone chimney-breast.

Then he met her eyes. 'Did he go out as soon as he heard the car?'

'No.' She shook her head. 'He's been indoors all day —ever since I collected him late last night, in fact.'

He must have got his skates on! Audley thought admiringly.

But then, in his line of retirement-business and with his training, Peter would have had his contingency plans worked out, right down to passports, spare cash and safe houses.

Which, of course, brought him to the old moment-of-truth, which they had rehearsed together on that unfor- gettable-unforgotten night, straight out of Kipling, on which they had both relied now: If