'And doesn't that frighten you?' He watched her fish cutlery out of a drawer, and glasses from a cupboard. The cutlery was beautiful bone-handled antique, tarnished but razor-sharp, and the glasses were the thick and ugly petrol-coupon variety, and none-too-clean. But he was past caring about that now.
'I don't see why it should.' She let him pour, and then raised her glass high. 'Here's to us — and crime paying, anyway!'
Then she drank. 'Mmm! It is good — trust Daddy!' Then she attacked her beef. 'Mmmm! So's this!' She grinned and munched appreciatively. 'I mean ... if you look at what Johnnie and Reg dug up about him . . . it is all rather vague . . . sort of gossip, I mean . . . There were inquests. But there was always a perfectly reasonable story of some sort —
like that young man who blew himself up, during that cavaliers-and-roundheads mock-battle — '
'After someone else had got murdered, at another mock battle?' The need to concentrate on what she was saying detracted cruelly from the paradisal meat and wine. 'And dummy2
that case has never been closed, Reg says.'
'But Audley wasn't there, that time — '
'So far as anyone knows. But he was there the second time —
'
'But nowhere near the explosion — ' All the same, she nodded as she cut him off ' — I do agree, though: he is rather accident-prone . . . Except that he's never been summoned to give evidence, or anything like that.'
'Or anything like anything.' He swallowed, and disciplined himself against eating and drinking for a moment. 'And the year before last, when that visiting Russian general died —
Tully says he didn't have a heart-attack — that he was shot by someone.'
'But not by Audley, Ian.' Jenny didn't stop eating, but she had somehow become a devil's advocate. 'He's a back-room boy, not a gunfighter. He's too old for that sort of thing.'
'But he was there, somewhere — Tully also thought that — '
'No.'
Thus flatly contradicted, Ian returned to his food. Whatever crimes Audley had, or had not, connived at, there was no reason why he should compound them by letting his meat congeal on his plate. If Jenny thought Audley was innocent of the Russian general's death, so be it. And if he'd never come out into the limelight, so be that, too. Because Jenny quite obviously thought there were other things he had to answer for.
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'No.' She pushed her plate away and then filled her glass again, like Daddy's daughter.
'No?' He pushed his own empty glass towards her.
'Johnnie didn't think that. I told him that. But then he did some checking, and he says there was one hell of a shoot-out, somewhere down there in the West Country. Only it was all very efficiently hushed-up. And the Russians helped with the hushing, apparently.' She nodded at him. 'And Audley was probably mixed up in that.'
'Probably?' Jenny had a prime source — that was both obvious and nothing new: Jenny had more sources than she had had take-away dinners (or expensive restaurant dinners, for that matter). But, what was more to the point, it would be easier to excavate a two-year-old scandal than a nine-year-old one. 'Probably, Jen?'
'Maybe. But who cares?' She shrugged. 'It's Audley-and-Philly-Masson we're after, not Audley-and-General-Zarubin, darling.'
'But Zarubin sounds more promising.'
'I don't agree.' She savoured her wine, as though she was thinking of Daddy again. 'Zarubin was just an effing-Cossack, by all accounts — not one of dear Mr Gorbachev's blue-eyed boys. Which presumably explains all the friendly co-operation.' Then she was looking at him, and she very definitely wasn't thinking of Daddy. 'I don't say that isn't interesting. And maybe we'll find a place for it eventually.
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Because once we start turning over stones then I expect all sorts of creepy-crawlies will start emerging and running for cover — that's the beauty of it. Because Audley goes back a long way. Long before poor Philip Masson. So God only knows what we'll turn up.'
Now it was poor Philip Masson. And just now it had been
'Philly'. But that could wait. 'And yet no one's ever heard of him, Jen.'
'Of Audley?' She shook her head. 'That's not quite true. In fact, it's entirely untrue: lots of people have heard of him.
Lots of people know him, actually . . . and he seems to know a lot of people, putting it the other way round. They just don't know what he does, exactly.'
'But you think you do know?'
'No — not yet. But . . . it's like, he's often in the background of things, so far as I can make out so far. Like, with a collection of people in group photographs, when you keep seeing the same face somewhere in the back . . . Or, you're not quite sure, because he's always the one who's partly obscured by someone else — or he's moved just as the photographer pressed the button, so he's blurred.' She shrugged. 'Like Reg said, he gives advice to people — to committees, and suchlike. But his name never appears.'
'That isn't so, according to John Tully. He's listed in quite a few places — in Who's Who, for a start. With a CBE in the early 1970s. And an honorary fellowship at King Richard's.'
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'Oh yes.' She wasn't put off in the least. 'But it's all so vague
— isn't it? An "assistant-principal" here, in one place —
Home Office, was it? Then a transfer to the Ministry of Defence. And writing those books . . . But, darling, it's all got nothing to do with what he really does, of course — it's all flumdiddle. Dear old Reg said it all, didn't he? "Cloak-and-dagger", is what he is. Only this time it was more like "dagger-and-cloak", maybe.'
'Reg also said "research".' There was something in her voice he hadn't heard before, and couldn't pin down now; almost a hint of underlying passion, of malevolence even. All he knew was that he had to argue against it. '"Advice and research", was it? And the man must be close to retirement, damn it, Jen!' But that hadn't been all Reg had said, he remembered.
And that weakened his resistance to her will. 'If they retire in his line of work.'
'Yes. And that's interesting too.' Her voice was back to normaclass="underline" maybe he had imagined that hint of genuine feeling under the twenty-four-hour insatiable curiosity which powered her normally, without commitment to any cause other than the truth. 'And particularly interesting to you, as it happens, Ian.'
'To me?' What he was going to get now was one of the arguments she had intended to use in support of the Scotch beef and the Chateau Haut-Brion (which she had surely known for what it was), in the event of his welshing on the deal.
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'Uh-huh.' She gestured towards the Haut-Brion. 'I think I may have some idea of what he does, actually.'
This was that source of hers again: a source she would never mention even as a source, unlike Reg Buller's vague 'There's a bloke I know, in The Street/in the Met/ down the nick/
down the pub/in the business', or John Tully's notated references to 'Contact AB' and 'Contact XY' in his reports, whose identities would all be in a little black book somewhere.
'Go on, darling — don't mind me. I've had more than my share.'
'So you have.' So she had. And if she'd been his, and he'd been hers, he might worry about that; though, as they never would be (which was the old familiar spear in his heart, twisting but never killing), and as she never seemed to change, no matter how much she'd drunk, except that she burned more brightly still, he had no right to worry.
'I've got more — I bought a whole case, darling. And the little man gave me what he called a "case-price", so our bottle was absolutely free — '