"You don't look happy, Peter," said Sir Frederick.
Well, it still might all be conjecture, because it was no good kidding himself that he was up to calculating all their angles yet. But one thing wasn't conjecture, and it ruddy well cooled his ardour now: Superintendent Cox had seized his dismissal like a thirty-year prisoner snatching a Royal Pardon, without asking questions or waiting for answers. And it wasn't just because Cox preferred the safe routine of checking on a dead Hemingway to the mind-bending frustrations of handling live Macreadys and Audleys, but because he knew enough not to want to know more.
"Should I be, then?" Richardson grinned insecurely. It was just like David had once said, the time to worry was when other people looked sorry for you as they said goodbye.
"You don't fancy a trip to Italy?"
Ten out of ten for Answer Number One.
"To bring David back in chains? Not especially, no."
"Not in chains. . . . Would you rather go back to Dublin?"
"You must be joking!" Richardson shuddered.
"Then what's so awful about Italy?"
"Nothing—about Italy." Richardson hardened his voice. "But there are too many loose ends in England."
"For example?"
dummy2
"Hemingway, for a start. If he's the man old Charlie shot—
their inside man here on an outside job—it doesn't damn well make sense—"
"And neither does that." Macready tossed the file on to the table irritably.
"Why not, Neville?"
"Because the idea of Hotzendorff bringing a plum out of Russia verges on the ridiculous, that's why."
"He didn't bring it out. He sent it. And he didn't send it to us, so it seems." Sir Frederick paused. "And it rather looks as though he died for it."
"He died of a heart attack—" Macready frowned suddenly.
"You know what's in the file, then?"
"I read it when the news of his death finally reached us. And then there was the—ah—question of the widow's pension to be settled."
There was a half-second of awkwardness, lost on Macready, whose pension and life expectancy were matters of black and white actuarial certainty, but not lost on Richardson.
"You see, Peter—" Sir Frederick ignored Macready, "—
Hotzendorff worked for us for fifteen years as a courier in Russia."
"A sort of postman," amended Macready.
"But useful enough. He travelled for an East German farm machinery company—he was our main source for the Virgin Lands scheme for example."
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"In North Kazakhstan, which happens to be about 3,000
miles from the North Sea," said Macready, "and has no oil."
"He covered a great deal of territory elsewhere. And he was always very careful—and they trusted him."
"So did we."
"With very much better reason. You don't have to play the devil's advocate, Neville."
"I'm not trying to. It's simply that he wasn't the sort of man to pick up this sort of information. He was just a delivery agent for second-class mail."
"He put in his own reports too."
"Most of which he could have copied from the magazines and papers he bought in the streets. For the sort of thing we've been talking about he just didn't have the background—and he certainly didn't have the contacts, Fred."
Sir Frederick sighed, then shook his head. "You can say what you like, Neville. But at the end of the day the only clue we've got points to him. And—" he tapped the file, "there's circumstantial evidence in here that backs it up, too."
Richardson grasped thankfully at last at the answer to the question which had been nagging him increasingly: "What clue?"
Sir Frederick half smiled. "The one you brought to us, Peter—
the one Narva gave to David's friend, and he gave to David, and Professor Freisler handed on to you: the Little Bird from dummy2
East Berlin."
"The little dickey bird?"
"He started as Dickey Bird, curiously enough, short for Richard von Hotzendorff. He was rechristened Little Bird in
'61. Born in Konigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad, in 1914.
David would have recognised him straight away, naturally—"
"David's signature is on the authorisation transferring the file from active to dead," said Macready. "His and Latimer's.
July 1970—that would be the yearly clear-out."
"So he'd have remembered the circumstantial evidence too, then," Sir Frederick nodded.
Richardson looked at him expectantly.
"Nothing to do with oil, I'm afraid, Peter—Neville's right there. There isn't a smell of it."
"What is there a smell of?"
"The warm South—Italy. Three smells of it, too: Hotzendorff was there first with the German army in '42 and '43. The second time was twenty-five years later."
"Twenty-five?" The addition rolled in Richardson's brain like a jackpot number. "1968."
"Early in that year. He was dead before the end of it."
"And Narva was buying into the North Sea."
"Exactly."
"The Italian trip isn't in the file." Macready's tone was aggrieved.
dummy2
"No. We didn't know it until after he was dead."
"And there was a third time." Now there was nothing casual about Macready's question, his voice was sharp.
"Not for Hotzendorff, there wasn't. Not long after he died his wife —his widow—got out of East Germany with her three children. She came to us to enquire about his pension. Or at least his gratuity—"
"She got out? You mean we didn't get her out?" Macready cut in quickly.
"We didn't—she did."
"On her own, with three children? She must be a woman of considerable initiative. The East Germans don't like losing children—did she say how she'd done it?"
"She had friends, she said. And some money saved—it can be done with that. She also said that her husband had placed some money in Italy on his last trip. With a bit of a pension it would be enough to bring the family up, if we could drop a word here and there." Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them. "She said they'd always planned to retire there one day. We had no reason to doubt her story. . . ."
Oh, brother! thought Richardson—a woman of considerable initiative!
"I suppose Little Bird really is dead—or that he hasn't just migrated to sunnier climes?"
Sir Frederick looked at him a little reproachfully. "I said we didn't doubt her story, Peter—I didn't say we didn't check on dummy2
it. Although it might have been better in this instance if we hadn't."
The obvious question hung in the air between them for a moment, unasked.
"We checked his death in the hospital files in Moscow, and we closed down his contact network—that was all routine.
And then we ran another check on her eight months later in Italy, just to make sure he hadn't been clever." Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them bleakly. "And it was David Audley who had the job of setting up the checks."
"Okay—that does it." Macready turned away from the desk to stare directly out of the window into nowhere, nodding spasmodically to himself.
"You mean David had the necessary information to spark him off?"
"More than that—he had enough to guess he'd been taken for a ride by someone."
There was no need to expand on that: it would bug David Audley to hell and back to find out that—it would light his blue touchpaper as nothing else would.
Richardson turned back to Sir Frederick. "So Little Bird sold us out to Narva—he went private on us?"
"That's not important." Macready swung back again, the excitement rising in his voice. "It isn't the first time something like that's happened. A little bit on the side for a rainy day, put away somewhere nice and safe abroad—it's dummy2
much safer than defecting, and Italy's a darned sight more comfortable than anywhere behind the Curtain, especially when it's your old age you're thinking of. ... And he was getting on, Hotzendorff was—this wasn't his September Song, he was well into October. . . ." Macready trailed off, head cocked on one side, half smiling to himself as though suddenly taken with that thought, his excitement of a moment earlier apparently quite forgotten. "Where do flies go in the wintertime? Nobody knows. They just disappear—