The Memory Trap

'And —?'

A stronger gust of wind swirled over and around them, carrying the word away up the valley.

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'We also checked up on your own little accident, in London.

And that was a lot easier. We only had to wake up a succession of irritable civil servants, as well as policemen, and pull rank on them. Plus the Defence of the Realm and the anti-terrorist regulations, and the Third World War.'

Mitchell took his revenge steadily. 'And we established that you'd had an accident which wasn't your fault. As a result of which an Irishman named Murphy was fined ?15, with ?25

costs, after pleading guilty to careless driving. Although his present whereabouts — and the whereabouts of a million other Murphies —'

'The devil with my accident, Mitchell!' At the third try, Richardson got his word in edgeways. 'What about the spade?'

'The spade?' Mitchell decided not to settle for one small victory, even for the time being. 'That was PC Jenkins, retired. And you know how many Jenkinses there are in Wales — retired and unretired? Even Policemen Jenkinses?

'Daft', they thought I was, at first. And then 'bloody daft'

when I told them you'd lost a spade fifteen years ago, maybe.

But now you wanted it back, and —'

'Paul — ' Audley cut him off sharply ' — that's enough. Just tell us about the spade.'

Mitchell looked at him, not so much twitchingly now as tired.

And angry with it. 'Right, David. So ... I won't tell you the rest of it, then — not even when I had to get Henry Jaggard to phone up the Chief Constable? After the Duty Sergeant told dummy1

me to piss off — ?'

Just for a spade! thought Audley. With no poor crooked scythe to go with it — never mind any hammer-and-sickle.

But . . . six men, in two countries, had died because of that spade, maybe. And, but for Jack Butler's 'error of judgement', and then Colonel Zimin's possible error, he himself might have been one of them, by God!

'No.' There might come a time to make a joke of this, if they outlived this day, and came safe home: Normandy had been like that. But this was neither the time nor the day. 'Just tell us about the spade.'

'Okay.' Mitchell shrugged at him, and then at Richardson.

'He didn't remember the bloody spade — not at first ... He didn't even remember you, Major — not at first, when we gave him your name, no matter that you remembered his: he thought we were 'daft', too.' Against all the odds, Mitchell brightened slightly. 'But then, in the end, he did remember.

Only not because of you, Major. It was the owners of the spade he remembered. Because they were unfinished business — that's what he called them: 'unfinished business'

— '

'What owners?' Richardson was calm now, almost ingratiatingly so.

'The owners.' Just as suddenly, Mitchell forgot to be angry.

'The owners of the crashed van you reported — ? It was their van . . . and they'd reclaimed it. And then they came back for their spade — ' Now he was calm too. 'Yes — ?'

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'Were they the drivers?' Richardson shook his head. 'When I came on that van, it was on its side, in the road, with no one in it. And the windscreen was broken — it had hit the bank, and turned over . . . And there was blood all over the front seats. And . . . there was the spade there — on the floor — ?'

'So you called the police, like a good citizen.' Mitchell nodded. 'But the owners said it was stolen. And the police never found the drivers. But that was what PC Jenkins remembered, eventually: he thought they'd be in the local hospital, cut-and-bruised ... or, preferably, worse. Like, detained for observation, with suspected fractures, to make it easy for him. But they weren't . . . which he thought was odd.

But. . . the spade wasn't odd, Major.'

Richardson frowned at him. 'But I told him to show it to his boss — to find out who it belonged to. I told him what he ought to do, in fact, damn it!'

'Well, he did find out that.' Mitchell stared back at him defiantly. 'The owners came in to collect it. And he only remembered that because he already knew them: they were a couple of 'general dealers' from Abergavenny. Two right old lags he'd known for years . . . receiving stolen property, plus a bit of sheep-stealing, and all that. And he'd reckoned at first, once he'd traced the ownership of the van, that they'd be the ones who'd turn up black-and-blue — that they'd both been pissed when they crashed the van, and had run off so that they could sober up and establish an alibi . . . Which they had, of course —had an alibi: they said the van had been dummy1

nicked from their yard, and they didn't even know it was gone until the police phoned them up.' He shrugged again.

'So there wasn't anything he could do then. Because they clearly hadn't been bashed-up in any accident — not on that occasion, anyway.'

'Not on ... that occasion?'

'Uh-huh.' Mitchell grinned. 'The real reason why he remembers the pair of them was that he did get 'em in the end — for drunk-driving, that is.' He nodded. 'It was about eighteen