other than Clarence? It's almost as foul as Cecil.'
'I shall call you Soppy, darling. And this is Beatrice.'
'Hell,' said Glodstone, who had just been bitten on the ankle by the Peke.
Now as he stood gazing at his own nonentity in the bathroom he knew he was beaten. They would play bridge all evening with the Shearers and he'd get told off for bidding badly and have to make the coffee and have to take that bloody Beatrice for a pee before going to bed. And he knew what they'd drink. Creme de menthe. Constance Sugg had returned to her roots.
In a hedge in South Armagh, Peregrine, now Number 960401, stared through the night-sight of his rifle at the figure moving in the field below. It could be a Garda but he didn't care. He'd already notched up five IRA men, two poachers and an off-duty RUC constable, not to mention an Army Landrover, to such awful effect that even the local Protestants had joined with the IRA in declaring his sixteen square miles a No-Go Area, and the Army avoided the place. Peregrine didn't care. He was in his element, doing what he had been trained to do. And every few weeks an unmanned balloon (there'd been an unfortunate incident with a helicopter) would drift over for him to shoot down and collect his ammunition and supplies.
Not that he needed the latter. He'd already bagged a sheep for his supper in the burrow he'd dug halfway down an old well and was rather looking forward to it. The Major had said one should live off the land, and he did. He squeezed the trigger and watched the man drop. Then he obeyed another of the Major's dicta, that an army marched on its stomach, and crawled the two miles back to his hide-out. Presently, in the happy knowledge he was doing exactly what he'd been told, he pulled his rifle through and oiled it, and settled down to leg of lamb.
The End
