Elizabeth found herself wishing that she hadn't poured her drink on the ground. She was thirsty, and she had ruined her shoes. And for a moment she had also shown herself an Elizabeth Loftus who rather frightened her.
'But I didn't make a mistake,' said Audley.
Elizabeth gave him a look of pure hatred, which she couldn't disguise.
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'He's getting drunk again, you see, Elizabeth.' Audley brushed aside her hatred. 'He must have a liver like an old boot. I remember getting him drunk back in '58 - very drunk… and it wasn't difficult even then.'
'You didn't make a mistake,' agreed Haddock Thomas. 'But, whereas that is what you believe, it is what I know, you see, David. Marxism, with all its egregious little heresies, socialism included, has never attracted me.'
'I know. You spent a whole night telling me, indirectly.' Audley smiled at Elizabeth. 'The uniting theme of all classical literature is the right and wrong uses of authority - Antigone telling Creon to go bowl his hoop, according to Sophocles, and also Augustus in Res Gestae… You made a great impression on me that night, Haddock. I just couldn't see you doing a Philby on us.'
'No?' Haddock seemed to be fascinated by something far below and far away. 'I'm flattered.'
'You should be.' Audley closed his eyes. ' "This amazing mental dimension, where nothing is barred, and the extent to which you can think is only limited by the limits of your own comprehension and imagination: it's like being let into the Universe itself - the whole atmoshpere of the classics is of a boundless, expanding, gloriously fascinating, bloody marvellous universe - and let's throw our thoughts out there!"'
'Did I say all that? Well, I must have been pissed, I agree!' The far-away horizon still engrossed the old man. 'And you must have a bloody-marvellous memory, David.'
'No. Just a tape-recorder under the table. We weren't so good with bugs then, but you didn't know the difference. And I played it again just the day before yesterday, to refresh my not-so-bloody-marvellous memory. We didn't have bugs, but we weren't wholly inefficient.'
'But you have made a mistake, nevertheless.' Haddock Thomas turned to Audley at last.
Audley opened his mouth, then closed it. 'What did I do wrong?'
'Nothing then.' Haddock Thomas looked sad. 'But everything now, I suspect.'
This time Audley's mouth remained open.
'You said you were busy doing something important. But you're not doing it now, are you?'
Haddock opened his old hands on his lap in an eloquent gesture. 'Could it be that they want you busy here, wasting your time and mine, simply so that you can't be busy there, dummy2
David?'
Haddock Thomas turned back to Elizabeth. 'I always used to tell my boys that the Latin language is simple and logical. And Greek is even better - more elegant, even. But if you look for complexities, you will only end up by deceiving yourself. So look for the simplicities, and all the nonsense will disappear.'
Audley stood up. 'Can I use your phone, Haddock?'
'My dear fellow, of course - '
The garden gate squeaked and clanged at their backs, cutting him off.
'Or perhaps not,' said the old man, staring past them. 'Because, unless I am very much mistaken, you are about to be taken into custody, David. In which case you will be here for some time, I'm afraid.'
Elizabeth saw two things unforgettably, in the instant of disaster, which were all the more memorable for the difference between them.
The DST men who came through the gate were old Mr Willis's creatures: hounds who moved left and right, ready for anything while they made way for the huntsmen behind them who would make the arrest, if not the kill.
But they were moving, and Audley wasn't.
At least, he wasn't until he raised his glass to Haddock without turning round.
'My mistake - this time, if not last time, Haddock.' He sipped the wine. 'But then, you got me into a lot of trouble then, too, I seem to remember.' He took another sip.
'Oh no!' Suddenly Haddock was very Welsh. 'It wasn't me then, and it isn't me now. We all make our own mistakes in the end, David. We don't need any help from outsiders.'
EPILOGUE:
Mistakes and Monsters
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Colonel Butler had an atavistic preference for handling difficult situations standing up, like any old red-coated infantryman facing cavalry. So when Audley finally arrived he had positioned himself by the window, away from the funk-hole of the Director's desk.
'Well, David?' For one last moment he pretended to admire the view across the Thames, which he considered vastly inferior to both his neat Surrey hedgerows and his native Lancashire dales.
'Jack.' Audley sounded unabashed. But then he had never been an easily abashed man.
'Good leave?'
'Curtailed leave.' Neither did Audley look more crumpled - tie always carelessly knotted, good suit always creased - than he habitually did. 'What the hell have you been doing?'
'Ah… now latterly I have been in the pokey, in a gentlemanly sort of way.' Audley grinned disarmingly. "The French didn't treat us badly, actually - thanks to Peter Richardson getting off a call to Dale just before they swooped. It was all really more embarrassing than unpleasant.'
'Oh yes?' Colonel Butler was not disarmed. 'And is that how you would describe what happened to Brian Turnbull, David?'
The grin vanished and the shutters which Butler knew of old came down. 'Yes. That was a bad scene, Jack. But not my fault.'
Butler concealed his astonishment with some difficulty: he had not expected Audley, of all people, to weasel out of it like that. For tactical reasons, if not for moral ones, Audley had always been ready to take the blame in the past, even when it had not been properly his.
'No?' He tested his incredulity casually.
'No, Jack.' Audley shook his head.
Another tack, then. 'Yes. That's what Oliver Latimer says.'
'What?' Audley frowned. ' What?'
'Latimer says you were only obeying orders. He has taken full responsibility for everything that has happened.'
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'Well - ' There was a flicker of fire behind the shutters ' - well, you can fuck that for a game of soldiers, Jack - for a start!'
'Indeed?' Torture would not have wrung that from Audley. But, as Butler had calculated, he was never going to let himself owe anything to Oliver St John Latimer. 'But he did give you an order. Is that not so?'
' Phooey! Audley gestured angrily. 'I wouldn't have obeyed it if I hadn't wanted to.' He tugged at his tie. 'Christ, Jack - I was all ready to make a bust at Cheltenham… or almost ready, anyway. I could have gone to the DG - or the Joint Committee - no trouble. You know that as well as I do!'
'But you didn't.' Butler controlled his own anger. 'So your man in Cheltenham is probably in Moscow by now, with all those American transmissions in his head. And … we lost Brian Turnbull.' He almost added Who was one of my subalterns in Korea, under another name, in another time, damn you! But there was nothing to be gained from that: the letter he had to write, to that elderly maiden aunt in Eastbourne who was all the next-of-kin Brian Turner had, was his business, not Audley's.
Audley was staring at him. 'We would have lost Turnbull anyway, Jack. Even if I hadn't screwed things up. Or someone, if not him.'
Now they were coming to it. 'What do you mean?'
Audley took time to think. 'You asked me what the hell I've been doing, Jack. And the answer is that I've been making the mistake I was supposed to make - no question about that. I let myself be taken, and they took me. And, at a guess, it was Panin.'