"Don't worry—"
"I'm due to meet him as soon as I get off this phone."
"Good, good. And how do you rate your chances with him?"
Good, good— fine, fine— don't worry! The very imbecility of the reassurance sobered Roche. He could see, across the angle of the square, a French family at an outside corner table in the restaurant which had one star in the Michelin: the father was studying the menu calmly, dutifully watched by his wife and two impeccably-behaved children. Everything was right and well-ordered in their world in which the vital decision was confit d'oie chaud or confit de dinde mayonnaise, and their lives would go on untroubled regardless of his own agonies.
"I know one hell of a lot more about him than there is in the file."
"For example?"
The French father handed the menu to his wife and took up the wine list.
Well, as Lexy would say, what the hell! "He's the illegitimate son of a schoolmaster named Willis, who probably screwed his mother at a commem ball at Oxford in the twenties," he said brutally. "Will that do for a start?"
"Willis the Godfather?" inquired the voice politely. "Does he know?" Pause. "Audley, I mean."
The father closed the wine list. That decision was not within his wife's competence.
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"They all knew in the end. I suppose he was the last to find out. But I don't think anyone ever told him, actually."
Another pause. "So what?"
"They've been screwing each other since, in their own different ways." That wasn't fair so far as Wimpy was concerned: Wimpy had been suffering in too-late silence ever since; and Mr Nigel had died too early for Master David to achieve anything except the purely intellectual satisfaction of restoring what his official father had neglected.
"And knowing that will help you?" The voice, which was more likely Stocker's than Clinton's, was cheerfully sceptical.
"Well, at least it accounts for him being such a bastard." But then again, it wouldn't be too difficult to cherish The Old House for itself, so perhaps he was also being unfair to Audley. Except that the man's deliberate neglect of Wimpy over recent years, which might have been dismissed as unthinking youthful carelessness in anyone else, fitted the first image better: Mrs Clarke's lively, affectionate little boy had changed over the years into nothing if not a careful and calculating man, so it seemed.
"And that helps?" The Stocker-voice persisted, blandly devaluing his progress and rousing Roche's own contrariness.
"For Christ's sake, Major—let the dog see the bloody rabbit before you start whistling at it! I told you, I haven't even met the man yet!"
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The Frenchman was ordering his dinner now, and from the way he was placing the order, with precise gestures of the hand and the fingers, he was accompanying it with instructions about the cooking too.
Sheer envy roused Roche to further contrariness. "Don't you want him now, Major?"
"Of course we do." Stocker didn't deny the identification of rank. "But things have moved on a bit since you were briefed, and we're running short on time. So we've got to look to the next phase of the operation."
Ah! At last, the poor damn dog was about to be shown the wolf hiding in the thicket behind the rabbit!
"What next phase?" asked Roche obediently.
"We have a job for Audley to do down there. You didn't think recruiting him was the end of it, did you?"
The wine waiter was hovering over the Frenchman. "Roche
—"
"Yes, sir." Roche had no more precious time to waste. He had to show that the dog could bite back. "This second phase—
would it have anything to do with a Frenchman named d'Auberon?"
"What?"
"D'Auberon. D-apostrophe-A-U-B-"
"D'Auberon—yes," Stocker crackled the line. "What do you know about d'Auberon?"
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Roche wondered whether it would not have been safer to have let Stocker say his piece first rather than to have tried to impress the Major with his cleverness. Because that
'D'Auberon—yes' had only been an acknowledgement, not a confirmation, and if Madame Peyrony and Lexy were wrong. . .
"I said 'What d'you know about d'Auberon?' " repeated Stocker. "Well?"
The trouble was, he knew absolutely nothing about d'Auberon beyond Madame Peyrony's praise and Lexy's prattle. Until a few hours before, he'd never heard of the man.
"I know he's here, for one thing," he played for time, blessing the miles of telephone wire separating him from Stocker-in-the-flesh. The fact that d'Auberon was here, not half-a-dozen miles from Audley—and from all the rest of them, and not least himself—was all he really did know for sure. But try as he would, he still couldn't even place the man's name, never mind which particular Algerian row had sparked his resignation. The hijacking of Ben Bella from the Moroccan air liner on General Beaufre's order had caused a flurry of such resignations, but the date didn't quite fit. The oil discoveries or the building of the Morice Line were much better bets—
"Come on, man!" snapped Stocker. "What else d'you know?"
Not how but what, thought Roche. "Well, naturally I know what he was doing, Major," he said dismissively, as though to dummy5
state the obvious.
"But you weren't in Paris then, Roche."
Wasn't I? The months flashed before Roche's eyes. Except for the odd weekend—except for the long, boring communications course and his long leave which had together caused him to miss the whole ghastly excitement of the Suez crisis—
God! It wasn't Algeria at all— it was Suez!
"But I made up for lost time when I got back, naturally."
"Those meetings had nothing to do with your work, Roche."
What meetings?
"No, they didn't, I agree. And of course I don't know everything that went on in them ... I only know what I heard."
What meetings, for Christ's sake?
"You never reported what you heard," said Stocker accusingly. "Why not?"
What meetings had gone on during Suez? He'd been out of circulation for the best part of three months, sweating and fretting on the communications and instructional courses, and then on leave. There would have been dozens of meetings, political and military, during that last desperate revival of the moribund Entente Cordiale, attended by all the ghosts of 1914 and 1939 as well as everyone from Eden and Mollet downwards! But they had all been dust and ashes by dummy5
the time he had returned—ashes still hot with recriminations against perfidious Albion which he hadn't dared to rake over.
"Why not?" Stocker snapped the question at him again.
The quick answer to that was 'It had nothing to do with my work, like you said, Major', but the thought of Suez cautioned Roche against facetious answers. That wound was too raw, and too much pride and too many reputations had been lost over it, for that sort of reply.
"It was just gossip, sir—bazaar gossip . . . after-dinner coffee stuff. I didn't rate it."
"Gossip be damned! I should have thought any suggestion of a leak from the RIP sub-committee was worth reporting, gossip or not."
Lord God! thought Roche, thunderstruck. The RIP sub-committee! Sir Eustace Avery's own sub-committee!
"Well?" Stocker poked the question down the line fiercely.
"Sir?" But what was the question? And, whatever the question was, how was he going to answer it?
RIP.
"Well?"
Requiescat in pace.
Roche swallowed. "Yes, sir. It was ... in retrospect... it was an error of judgement, I admit. But it was just gossip."
Rest in peace—
"Of course it was an error. I don't mean that." Stocker clearly dummy5