Most people think they lost by it.” Andrew sniffed at him down the line. “Too good to be true, eh?”
“I said no such thing!” snapped Butler. One thing the years had convinced him of was the existence of pure evil. Fortunately, whatever the hell-fire preachers thought, it was very rare; but its corollary was the existence of pure good, though unfortunately that was even more rare.
“Well, that’s what some of my old mates down the nick thought, having had some disillusioning experiences in that direction.”
Andrew chuckled. “This turned out to be equally disillusioning in its way—for them, actually.”
“How so?” Butler frowned.
“He wasn’t as good as he seemed, was General Maxwell—
‘Squire’ Maxwell—Major-General Herbert George Maxwell, CBE, DSO, MC . . . and Grade VII on the piano, and heaven only knows what else . . . and clever with it, sir.”
dummy1
Andrew was clever too, Butler noted. But maybe he needed slapping down. “Don’t waste my time, Chief Inspector. Get to the point.”
“Yes, sir. He wasn’t as good as he seemed—if anything he was better.”
“Better?”
“Yes, sir. No secret mistresses. No strange perversions. All they dug up was a lot of good he was doing by stealth—and a lot of good he’d done in the past, that no one had known about.” Andrew allowed an edge of incredulity into his voice. “You know, there was even a letter—there were two letters—from his official enemies. . . . They intercepted all the letters to his grand-daughter
—”
“His enemies?”
“His official ones. One was from some branch of the Hunt Saboteurs—in his younger days he was a great one for foxhunting . . . there’s a Duntisbury Chase Hunt—saying how courteous he’d always been to them, even while he was outsmarting them . . . and how he’d always listened to them, and stopped the locals beating them up, and so on—that was one of the letters.”
Good Gracious! thought Butler.
“And the other was from Germany, with money for a wreath—
from some German Old Comrades’ associations, from the war. . . .
They’d read about his death in the papers, and they remembered how well he’d behaved—how he’d looked after their wounded dummy1
somewhere, and cheered them up by congratulating them on making a great fight of it, and fighting cleanly, and all that—which they’d never forgotten.”
Colonel Butler stared at his bookshelves, and remembered his own war, and the waste and the pity of it. And he could remember a German too, as they had remembered an Englishman—
“Sir?”
Colonel Butler blinked at his shelves, snapping free from the memories which for a moment—or for more than a moment—had taken him outside time, into a past which had had no future.
“Yes.” Only the present mattered now. “Right!” And the first question to be resolved concerned Chief Inspector Andrew himself.
“Now . . . you tell me exactly why you became so interested in General Maxwell, Chief Inspector. Right?”
“Yes, sir.” Andrew was satisfactorily ready for the question.
“Well... I heard this whisper—like I told you—that it wasn’t an Irish job . . . what I heard was that they didn’t know what the hell it was, to be exact, sir.” The returned emphasis came back to Butler smugly, like a cool return to a hard service. “So I had this feeling that we might get it, you know.”
That was a good and complete answer, even though it ignored the importance of their current preoccupation with the Cheltenham centre.
Or did it? The possibility that someone else might know about David Audley, never mind Jane Butler, chilled Butler.
“Just that? Nothing more?”
dummy1
“No, sir. Nothing more.” The reply was stoutly delivered, with a very slight colouring of outrage at the suggestion that its honesty had been considered questionable.
“Right.” Butler refused to let himself be embarrassed. Loyalty in exchange for trust, trust in return for loyalty, was what he gave and expected to receive in his appointments, but in this wicked world nothing was certain. Yet in this officer’s case the risk was worth taking. “You’re busy setting up the Cheltenham operation at this moment. I want you to drop that for twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, sir.” The faint red of outrage changed to the amber of expectation.
“I want you to get back in there somehow and pick up everything you can steal on General Maxwell, Chief Inspector.” Butler studied his books, looking for something which might inspire him, and felt belittled by them: there were so many clever men in those volumes, much more clever than he was, but many of them had come unstuck in spite of that. “And I mean steal—and I don’t want anyone to know that you’ve done it. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” It was understood—but could it be done? Butler waited while the Chief Inspector reconsidered the chances of doing successfully what he had already said he couldn’t do. “There is a way that I can maybe do that—indirectly.”
“All right.” Butler didn’t want to know about the nuts and bolts of the deception. But it was time now to give the carrot of trust to make the whip-lash of loyalty more bearable. And he had already burnt his boats, in any case! “You know where David Audley is at this moment?”
dummy1
That stopped the Chief Inspector in his tracks, by God!
“He’s on leave, sir. Writing another book. Do you want him?”
“No!” Butler recognised his mistake in that instant: it was no good blaming Jane—it was no good blaming Audley, even—no good telling himself that Audley ought to have behaved differently; that he ought to have behaved better, with his age, and his seniority, and experience, and intelligence—ought to have behaved best, not merely better.
David Audley had been born into the wrong age—that was what the man himself thought, and had never pretended otherwise: he always saw himself as a prince-bishop from his beloved middle ages, mediating between God and man, and meddling happily in the affairs of both to their discomfort.
Bletchley Park in the war would have suited Audley best— better than the Middle Ages, even—when he would have been safely bowed down not only by the responsibility and the importance and the challenge of the work, but also by the sheer volume of it, so that he wouldn’t have had either the time or the energy to get up to mischief.
That had been his mistake: he had let Audley free-wheel for too long, while Cheltenham matured—the cleverest man he knew, whom he (of all people) should know was also most capable of behaving irresponsibly when he was bored with lack of responsibility. Jane had only lit that fuse—and perhaps he was lucky that Jane (of all people) had lit it!
Chief Inspector Andrew hadn’t said a word this time. He had dummy1
waited patiently for the next bomb-shell, with his head down.
“Audley’s in Duntisbury Royal at the moment. I don’t want him disturbed until I know what’s happening down there.”
More silence from the other end of the line. It would be fascinating to know what Andrew thought of Audley: whether he knew enough yet to be as certain as Butler himself was that it could not be murder that Audley was contemplating. It would be something very different.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to find out: all he had to do was to recall the man and ask him what the hell he was up to—
the easiest thing, and all the easier because it was in his own nature to do exactly that, to secure good order and discipline through common sense . . .just as it was in Audley’s maverick nature to pursue his own insatiable curiosity in his own way, regardless of good order and discipline and common sense.