“Did she now?” Polite—but absolute—disbelief. “An‘ him a good family man? Well!”
“Miss Rebecca is telephoning him at his home now.” With Kelly that somehow only stretched the lie even more thinly.
“Is she so?” Kelly cocked an eyebrow at him. “An‘ not checkin’ up on me, then?”
“Checking up on you?”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Kelly equably. “After exchangin‘ notes with you, Captain.” Then he grinned. “I should have shot you last night, I’m thinkin’, an‘ said ’sorry‘ afterwards.”
Benedikt decided to be very German. “Please?”
“Ah now—don’t be givin‘ me that!” Kelly brushed his incomprehension aside. “You know what I mean very well. For I’ve fought you fellas—six long years . . . An’ if it was one thing dummy1
you never were, it was foolish. ‘Twas only when that little man—
him with the Charlie Chaplin moustache—’twas only when he interfered that you made mistakes . . . You never let us down otherwise, the Squire always said. So don’t be disappointin‘ me, eh? Checkin’ on me, he’ll be.”
Better to say nothing at all, Benedikt corrected himself.
“Or maybe he doesn’t need to check now?” Kelly stared at him for a moment, and then stood up suddenly and turned towards the window behind him for another moment, and tljen swung back just as quickly. “The hell with that! There was a fella I knew once, that’s dead and gone, but you lot can never rest easy because of him
—that’s why you’re here. Because there’s no other reason worth a damn—deny that if you can!”
There was no point in arguing. “And if I do not choose to deny it, Mr Kelly?”
“Faith—then you’ve wasted your time! For he told me nothing—
nothing—would you believe that?” He paused for only half a second. “But of course you would not! It’s the one thing that none of you will believe—because you can’t afford to believe it!
Because the thing that he had—whatever it was ... it was too big for you—is that a fact, now?”
Nothing?
“But I tell a lie! It was not nothing he told me—” Kelly leaned towards him “—he did tell me one thing. And you know what that was?”
Nothing? Or one thing?
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“He said to me: ‘I think I’m safe home at last, Michael— me that hates ’em all, for the black bastards they are, both sides of ‘em, that’ll never let a man rest . . . But if anything happens to me, then you start runnin’, Michael, an‘ don’t look over your shoulder, an’
don’t ever stop, because it’ll be you they’ll be after then, in case I’ve given it to you!‘ ” Gunner Kelly wiped his hand across his mouth. “An’ it did happen to him—so I ran. That’s all.”
“He gave you nothing?”
“Captain—don’t you think that if he’d given me anything I’d not have given it up by now? Mary, Mother of God! But how can you prove that you don’t know what you don’t know? You can only run
—that’s all you can do!”
Suddenly his face changed. “But then there was the Old General—
the Squire . . . that was the best man that God ever made out of clay ... I asked him for a bed for the night, an‘ I told him why I was running. And he gave me four years and his own life in exchange, is what he did.”
The man wasn’t lying. Aloysius Kelly was dead and it was the KGB who were coming to Duntisbury Chase—Benedikt had never been more certain of anything in his life.
“So this time—just for this time—I’m not running.” Kelly shook his head quickly. “Oh—I know we’ll not get them as have given the orders ... I know we’ll never get them—they’ll die in their beds most likely, one way—another way . . . But we’ll get the bastards who did their dirty work—it’ll be the same fellas, I’ll be bound . . .
An‘ we’ll make a great scandal, an’ get the headlines in all the papers—an‘ that’ll be big trouble for them, back home, that they’ll dummy1
not be forgiven for. An’ that’ll be something that’s better than nothing. They’ll not forget us, by God!”
In his own way he was saying what Miss Becky had said, thought Benedikt. And even if it wasn’t true Gunner Kelly believed it to be true.
And more, also: this would be a killing, not a capturing, if Gunner Kelly could make it so. Of that he was also certain.
So Audley had been right not to trust Gunner Kelly, whether it was Aloysius or the KGB out there: and prudence, in the most remote possibility that they were both wrong about Aloysius, decreed that he should be slowed down.
“But what about Miss Becky? Do you not have an obligation to her?”
“Ah—she’ll be all right. It’ll all be over, and her no part of it.”
Gunner Kelly looked at him. “I mind a time . . . Dr Audley said your dad was an anti-tank gunner—is that a fact, now?”
“Yes.” Benedikt frowned. What had Papa to do with this— with Gunner Kelly and Miss Becky?
“So he was, then! Well, I mind a time—it was in Tunisia it was, when I was with the Squire . . . And we bedded down in this little valley, minding our own business, an‘ thinking there wasn’t a Jerry within fifteen miles of us—an’ nothing in front of us, do you see . . . not that it was our affair what was in front of us—it was 25
pounders we had, and gunners we were . . . An‘ then there was all this terrible row one night—and it was bloody Jerries—” Kelly registered Benedikt suddenly “— that’s to say, it was Germans out dummy1
in front of us somewhere, where they’d no right to be at all... It was a wearying night, we had, not knowing what was going on over the ridge in front. But the Squire and all, they reckoned there was nothing we could do, an’ it was best to leave it to whoever was busy there, because the Germans weren’t coming forward, so far as we could make out, an‘ they weren’t shooting at us—they didn’t seem to be shooting at anything much, they were just shooting over our little valley. ... I think the Squire did get out for a bit, because that was the sort of thing he did. But he came back pretty smartish . . . Anyway, in the morning, a whole lot of Gordons came through—Scotsmen, anyway—infantry, clearing up the way they do ... walking along an’ shooting a few people, and taking prisoners, an‘ that . . . An’ the Squire says to me ‘Come on, Kelly, an’ let’s go an‘ have a look over the top there.’ And the first thing we saw was these Bofors guns—anti-aircraft guns . . . But they hadn’t been attacked, the crews had spent the whole night cowering in their emplacement, just like us ... So we went on a bit
—for they said there was guns in front of them down the ridge, which we took to be more Bofors . . . But then we came upon this extraordinary gun—begod, we more like tripped over it, for it was almost invisible, with no shield that I recall, an‘ no more than knee-high to a little fella . . . but with this great long barrel along the ground, pointing across the next valley. And there were its owners in their slit-trench just nearby, brewing up. So the Squire says:
’Who the devil are you, then?‘ And looks at the long gun, ’An‘
what the devil is that?’ says he, pointing at it ... An‘ they says
’Why, that’s the new 17-pounder, that is—an‘ if you want to know what it does, just you look across yonder’. An‘ they points across dummy1
the valley, an’ there’s four—maybe half a dozen—Jerry tanks, that’s come round the side across their front, poor devils—twelve hundred yards away . . . twelve hundred yards, if it was an inch!”
He shook his head in wonderment which had evidently not decreased in forty years. “That was the first time the 17-pounder ever went into action—in front of our gun position, saving our bacon. We couldn’t believe our eyes, I tell you!”