“Rebecca Maxwell-Smith—you don’t know her, Father, but I’ve mentioned her. She’s reading Law with me—we live the same hall of residence ... I had dinner with her in grandfather once—you remember, I told you, Father.”
Something faintly registered now, but only faintly. “So?” He was ashamed to admit the faint registration.
“So she had this hare-brained idea—more than harebrained, bloody dummy1
mad . . . But she was hell-bent on it, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her—absolutely bloody mad . . . But I thought I had to stop her somehow ...” She tailed off, and the very imprecision of her account of what Rebecca Maxwell-Smith was hell-bent on re-animated Butler’s concern, for all that it was safely one step away from her now; because if there was one thing that Jane Butler was—apart from being nineteen and hard-headed and sensible—it was to the point. And at the moment she was circling the point like a mongoose round a snake.
Even Butler himself was infected by her caution. “Why didn’t you come to me?” She would come to the vital answer in her own good time, with no need for the question.
“You didn’t come home on Friday.” She excused herself by accusing him. “Becky phoned—I was going to ask you, but you weren’t there . . . And you always said, if there was a problem Nannie Hooker couldn’t solve, and you weren’t here, we could phone Uncle David.”
True, thought Butler. But that was for you—and your problems.
And the odds on this one are that you probably wouldn’t have asked me anyway.. . . Yet, at the same time, it was the old fatal error he had made, of giving a precise command imprecisely, so that she had been able to obey him in circumstances he had not envisaged, disobediently.
“So what did he say?” This time, as he phrased the indirect question with false sincerity, leaving Rebecca Maxwell-Smith’s as-yet-unrevealed madness even further behind, he felt that little frisson of excitement he always did where David Audley was dummy1
involved: no one could ever be quite sure what Audley would do in any situation, including Audley himself.
“He said he’d help—of course.” Jane’s expression indicated that she had only just discovered what her father and others had learnt by experience. “But now I’ve received this from Becky—!”
She pushed the letter across the table towards Butler.
There were only a dozen or so words on it, with no sender’s address, as he had already noted, and no date either. Jay— Thanks a million for sending us your David.
Now we really have a chance of pulling it off-—
Love, Becky
Butler looked at his daughter interrogatively.
“He wasn’t meant to help them,” said Jane. “He wasn’t meant to help them pull it off—he was meant to put them off.”
She was coming to it now, at last, thought Butler. But, whatever
‘it’ was, at least she wasn’t directly involved in it.
He concealed his overwhelming relief behind a frown.
Jane frowned back at him. “They’re planning to murder someone, Father,” she said.
Colonel Butler closed the door of his library behind him, shutting out the sound of the girls’ argument over which of them was going to drive the Mini, and went over to the huge mock-Tudor window.
One of Sally’s horses was cropping the grass right up against the white fence on the other side of the forecourt. As he stared at it, the dummy1
animal seemed to sense his presence and looked up towards the house incuriously for a moment. Then it lowered its head again and the grass-tearing sound re-started. On the far side of the paddock, the other two horses were similarly engaged in their endless breakfast-lunch-tea-dinner, and beyond them, the field by the road was dotted with cows which at this distance reminded him of Brittain’s farm toys with which the girls had played when they were little and untroublesome.
Butler turned his back on the scene. It had served its purpose, because now he no longer wished to commit a murder of his own, both to pre-empt that which was allegedly in train and to punish the would-be murderers for the ruination of the quiet weekend with his girls, to which he had been looking forward.
Now commonsense and reason, disciplined by duty, had reasserted themselves. There were even books there on the shelves to remind him— there, high up on the left—that the rebellious American colonies had been supposedly lost because of the devotion of King George III’s ministers to carefree weekends . . . and there, two shelves down and to the right, that ‘lose not an hour’ had been Horatio Nelson’s watchword.
His eye travelled along the shelves, down to the other end of the long room: and there, also, was the gazetteer in which he could pinpoint the village of Duntisbury Royal, to direct him in turn to the right inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map from the shelf below, on which he could pin the gazetteer’s point exactly, if necessary.
The Mini’s engine roared outside. (Whichever of them was at the dummy1
wheel, she would take the drive too fast, and the corner at the entrance too dangerously, with all the reckless immortality of youth, untainted by experience and protected only by youth’s split-second reflexes.)
(David Audley had the experience, and to spare, and a rare quality of intuition. But he also had his blind spots, and he no longer had the reflexes for field-work, unescorted.) He listened to the engine-note, gauging the car’s exact position until it finally snarled away in the distance, on the main road, holding his breath until then. (There was nothing he could do about the girls: they were their own women now, for better or for worse, and he could only come to them when they called him. But there was a great deal he could do—and must do—about David Audley.) If necessary.
No certainty animated him yet, as he moved round the big desk, and sat down behind it, and reached decisively for the red telephone, with its array of buttons. Others, more gifted with that wild Fifth Sense than he, might be able to move from the known via the unknowable to the most likely. But he could only advance by experience and the map references of information received.
He lifted the red phone and pressed two of the buttons simultaneously. Two red eyes lit up, one steady, one blinking insistently. He watched them until they both turned green.
“Duty officer? I wish to speak with Chief Inspector Andrew. When you get him, patch him through to me on this line, please.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Thank you.”
dummy1
He replaced the receiver, so that one of the green eyes went out while the other turned red again, holding the scrambled line. Then he reached out, almost reluctantly, for the other phone—the ordinary humdrum Telecom instrument, beloved of Diana, Sally and Jane to his great quarterly cost, and dialled his required number, for all to hear who wanted to hear.
“The Old House.”
The childish treble rendered his next question superfluous. “Cathy
—are either of your parents home?” It pained Colonel Butler’s super-ego that he was glad his little god-daughter had been closest to the phone.
“Uncle Jack! Yes—Mummy is.” The breathlessness of her evident pleasure turned the pain into a wound. “Are you coming to my birthday party next Saturday?”