This time she wasn't off-balance, by one guilty half-second. But she couldn't tell him. 'You can take me with you, and put me off in Bond Street. I'll take a taxi from there.' But she mustn't leave him time to work that out. 'Only… you said, Paul, that when David and Debrecen got together - that when they came together - ?'
'People end up dead?' He nodded. 'And so they do.' Another nod. 'Back in '58 - there were two - two, if you count one in America, as well as one over here.' Pause. 'And in '83… well, there was one a few years before that, when the KGB hit someone up in Yorkshire.' Pause.
'But then there was '83, down in Dorset. About which I know no more than you do, because all I know is what is in the record.' Pause. 'And then there's '84… which was also in America. And which is also in the record, more or less.' This time the pause was so long that she had almost decided that he had finished. But then he nodded. 'But mostly less, rather than more. Because, for a secure file, it's still bloody non-committal, don't you think?
What David calls "half-arsed" - whatever that means… "Half-arsed", would you say, Miss Loftus?'
'What else does David say about it - about Debrecen?'
'Ah… now, as everyone keeps telling you, you'd better ask him, I think. And then draw your own conclusions. Because in my experience he never says quite the same thing twice.
So we should maybe compare notes some time - over dinner, say?'
She had to remember that he was still Paul. And not getting what he wanted only made him want it more: for Paul, failure was a beginning, not an end. 'He won't tell me the truth?'
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'That depends.' He pointed at the door again. 'I have to establish my alibi.'
'Depends on what?'
'On lots of things.' He swivelled on his heel, away from her, then towards her. 'David knows his duty. Do you know yours, Miss Loftus?'
'I know what I've got to do, Dr Mitchell.'
'Do you, Miss Loftus? And does it include scuppering David Audley to please Oliver St John Fatso-Latimer, pray?'
'No, it does not - '
'But are you sure of that, Miss Loftus? And is David Audley sure of it?' He held the pub door open for her. 'What you both want to ask yourselves is… do either of you really know what you are doing? As opposed to what you think you're doing?'
7
'Gorbatov — that is absolutely correct, Elizabeth.' Audley shifted his long legs in the Morgan's confined space. 'It all starts with him. Before Gorbatov, Debrecen was without light, and void, so far as we were concerned.'
For a man hypothetically cast as a prosecutor at his own court-martial, if not commander of the firing squad afterwards, David Audley had been just a little too relaxed, Elizabeth had thought.
True, he had protested briefly when she'd insisted on driving. But that had been more for form's sake than genuine desire, since they both knew that he was a bad driver, unable to keep his mind on the road at the best of times, and that this time she wanted his mind on other matters.
And true, he had been momentarily querulous at the sight of the little Morgan, into which he would not fit easily. But then, again, he had quickly adjusted himself to the imposition, mentally as well as physically, launching instead into a long anecdote about a hot-shot USAF pilot he'd once known, who had once owned just such a car -
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'Flew Voodoos, out of Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire - photographic reconnaissance — took some very pretty snapshots for us on one occasion too, much to the annoyance of a certain ally across the Channel… Bought himself one of these — same colour, British Racing Green, naturally. And you know what tickled him most, Elizabeth?'
Too relaxed, she thought. But no, she didn't know, she had said.
'Bought it from the factory (he'd been on the waiting list for years, of course), and paid for it in cash… some of which we'd just given him, for services rendered… but most of which was gambling profits — he was a mean poker player… But, anyway, he paid in cash, and there was seventeen shillings and fourpence change to come from his money. And they only had pound notes, so they sent an apprentice lad across the road to a pub to get him his seventeen-and-four, down to the last penny. Tickled him pink, that did.'
Much too relaxed. It hadn't tickled her at all.
'What was his provenance?' Although they weren't quite out of London proper the traffic was already thinning in the brief gap between closing time and early departure home.
'Was he ever in the real army - Red Army?'
'So he maintained. One of the heroes of the Patriotic War, who ran up the red flag over the Reichstag, or the Brandenburg Gate, or some such place, in '45. But I have my doubts, although he had his army stuff off pat, certainly. So they say.'
She was meant to pick that up. 'You never interrogated him?'
'No.' He gazed ahead sightlessly. 'He came across just about the time I came into the Service. So I was doing my homework while they were taking him apart. And I suppose you could say he was out of my league.'
Elizabeth drove in silence for a time, beckoned by the motorway signs. Paul had warned her that she would be out of her league in this affair, but that wasn't a bad way of improving one's game. All the same, the idea of an age of the world when David Audley had not been in the Blues' team overawed her somewhat: it was a defect in her powers of imagination that she could not readily enough accept that those who were old had once been young - that dear old Major Birkenshawe had once been a dashing subaltern, and even Father had been a dewy-eyed little midshipman - even Father!
'There were three of them, who assessed him - all Fred Clinton's trusted cronies. One was a don from Cambridge, who'd been a Doublecross consultant; one was ex-SOE -one of the few Fred had been really thick with, and had kept an eye on; and there was a soldier, an ex-dummy2
regular who'd watched Fred's back during the war. And he was the one who didn't reckon Gorbatov as a front line warrior: "In the army, but not of it"… meaning that he'd been NKVD from the cradle, keeping watch on the lads as they carried the red banners westwards.'
The West, the final blue sign ahead proclaimed, echoing him and inviting her into the fast lane.
'His version - Gorbatov's version - was that he'd been talent-spotted by one of Ignatiev's lieutenants in 1950, as a politically reliable career soldier. A very tough egg by the name of Okolovich - Anatoli Okolovich. And we knew all about him … In fact, he was an up-and-coming man at that time, and an invitation from him to join the happy band certainly wouldn't have admitted refusaclass="underline" it would have been either the Communist Party or the farewell party.'
That was one of Paul's little black jokes, so maybe it had started as one of Audley's.
Elizabeth took a quick sidelong look at the big man beside her. He was so utterly unlike Paul in so many ways that the ways in which they were like each other - ways which were sometimes no more than similar phrases and jokes trivializing unpalatable truths -
emphasized their underlying similarity. So -, allowing physically for Paul's age and much better looks, and mentally for his admiration of Audley, was this the shape of Paul Mitchell to come?
'So he did the sensible thing, and ended up in '56 as General Okolovich's leg-man in eastern Hungary, when the balloon went up there. Except that, according to him, he'd been feeding the General with soldierly warnings about trouble in store… which Okolovich had unwisely bowdlerized before passing on to his ambassador, one Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov - you remember him, Elizabeth?' He turned towards her. 'What's the matter, Elizabeth?'