He hadn't asked the driver because it was bad form as well as agin' the rules to ask. But now he didn't need to pop the question: It was David.
David was a shit, and maybe you couldn't trust him much.
And there were times when he was more than a bit of a bore, when he started theorising and moralising and soul-searching.
But David was also nobody's yes-man. He didn't give one damn for the bosses—he had proved that when the crunch came. And—this above all—David always got the really interesting jobs which nobody else dared touch. At least, he always got 'em in the end.
He grinned to himself and stretched for sheer joy—and dummy2
caught the driver beside him grinning too. So the man had noticed his reaction to the signpost, and understood it and even shared it. And that was interesting in itself, if not a brand new piece of information: it was the people below David who liked him, for his courtesy if for nothing else, while the people alongside and just above him disliked him in what was probably an inverse ratio to how much they needed him.
Good old David! There were inverted chevrons on his coat-of-arms, which was carved over the door of the Old House, but there ought to have been two fingers, raised and improper.
The shock came when they were halfway up the drive to the house, when the rain-caped policeman materialised out of a gap in the hedge to stop the car.
The driver clicked the door lock and wound down the window the regulation half-inch.
"We're expected," he said casually, before the policeman could speak. "Bennett and Captain Richardson."
"Would you please show me your identification, sir?"
"After I've seen your warrant card."
Face immobile, the policemen felt under his cape for the folder and then posted it through the gap. Behind him Richardson could see a civilian and another uniformed man.
He caught a glimpse of sergeant's stripes on the arm that was lifted to take back the warrant card and collect their own dummy2
folders.
They'd got a sergeant on the gate, checking the visitors—a sergeant in the rain, doing the job while his underlings looked on. Christ! It shook him almost as much as the first sight of the high blue helmet: first the discretion—no police cars parked in view anywhere so far— and then this too-high-ranking gateman, two sure signs of the worst sort of trouble.
The car crawled up the last few yards of drive slowly, and the house was still standing at least. But neither David's new grey Austin nor Faith's white Mini were among the half dozen cars parked in the forecourt. He scanned them for one he could identify, but without success.
"Captain Richardson?"
Another policeman had come out to intercept them. The place was crawling with them.
"Would you like to go straight in, sir?"
Inside the front door there was another policeman. And there was also Oliver St. John Latimer.
Richardson and Oliver St. John Latimer regarded each other with concealed distaste. Ordinarily he would not have worried Richardson in the least, because although he was considerably senior and brainier, he was also in Richardson's carefully considered opinion a pompous, arse-licking timeserver—you couldn't throw a snowball at Sir Frederick Clinton's backside without hitting Fatso in the back of the neck.
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But he was also an enemy of David's, and here he was walking about David's house as though he owned it, with an insufferably smug smile on his chops. So it was necessary to tread a little carefully.
"Where's David?" Richardson smiled sweetly. "And where's Faith, come to that? What's up?"
Latimer returned the smile with a smirk. "You'd better ask Brigadier Stacker, old boy."
"I'll do just that when I know where he is—or is that a secret too?"
"Just follow me, old boy."
Fighting off the temptation to kick the fat backside undulating just ahead of him, Richardson followed Latimer to the long, low-beamed sitting room.
"Ah, Peter!" Stocker took the pipe from his mouth and held out his other hand in welcome—a friendly gesture which somehow seemed as insincere as a whore's smile, at least in this setting; Stocker was another one with not so much breeding as brains, or he wouldn't have tried to welcome one man at another man's hearth. Nevertheless, there was a good, tough peasant streak under this ersatz behavior, which made him a man to reckon with, as well as an acceptable boss.
"Hullo, sir." Richardson decided to keep things as casual as possible, if only to give Oliver St. John Latimer less gratification. But the cold question was unavoidable.
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"Where's David and his missus?"
"As far as I know, they're both in Rome at this moment,"
replied Stocker, eyeing him unblinkingly.
"Oh . . ." He couldn't quite keep the relief out of his breath.
". . . then what are all the bluebottles for? I was beginning to think there'd been a death in the family."
"There's been a death right enough. A burglar was shot dead here last night."
Richardson stared at him, his brain adjusting to the information and amending it. Not a burglar, that was for sure
—not a burglar. For whatever Brigadier Thomas Stocker and Master Oliver St. John Latimer were interested in, it wasn't dead burglars.
"Who was he?"
"The burglar? We don't know."
It hardly needed amplifying: the sort of person who broke into David Audley's home and interested Stocker and Latimer wouldn't be carrying his home address and next of kin.
"We're working on it though," continued Stocker. "We don't have his—a—face to go on, but his prints are undamaged."
"He got it in the face?"
Stocker nodded.
"From whom? Who shot him?"
"David's handyman or gardener, I'm not quite sure which he dummy2
is."
"Old Charlie?"
"That's right. Charles Clark. It seems he thought some young hooligans had broken in—they seem to have been causing trouble round here—at least that's what his wife said at first.
But we haven't been able to get a coherent word out of him so far."
Charlie was big and slow—slow in mind and body. Yet he was also slow to anger, not the sort to shoot first and ask second.
"You're quite sure it was Charlie?"
"Not the least doubt about it. His wife had gone to fetch the village policeman—they found him sitting at the foot of the stairs crying his heart out, with his shotgun across his knees.
And on the top of the landing there was this chap with half his head blown off."
He paused, chewing at his pipe, but Richardson waited: there had to be more to it than this.
Stocker shrugged. "Actually we're pretty sure it was pure self-defence. The fellow on the landing shot at Clark—cut his ear with the bullet. There's a bullet hole in the newel post, which would have been just by his head. And of course we found the chap's gun at the bottom of the stairs near Clark. It must have fallen there, because he hadn't touched it. American Army Colt, standard issue—one round fired.
Richardson frowned. That figured well enough: Charlie had reacted instinctively, though faster obviously than anyone dummy2
who knew him would have expected. But that wasn't of any real interest. What mattered was that David's home had been raided by someone quite prepared to shoot it out with anyone who disturbed him, and that ruled out both the pro burglars and the juvenile scum. Steeple Horley was still light years away from New York in that, as in other things.
Also, it wasn't the first time that David had had uninvited visitors, he remembered suddenly: in fact that MVD chappie
—Guriev?—had been given the bum's rush from Britain for that, among several other incivilities.
And that, in turn, might account for Stocker's speedy arrival, for the Old House must by now be in the special Red Book the police had of people and places whose well-being was of interest and importance to security. A gunfight and a dead man in a Red Book house would set all the wires humming to Whitehall.