"If you don't mind awfully I don't think I will. The notion of going to bed reasonably soon has begun to exercise a hypnotic spell over me."
"Sure, you've had a long day. Well, in that case well just have a quiet noggin together and I'll toddle down there by myself. Can I get you something?"
"I don't think so," said Hunter, indecisively. Then he added decisively, "If there's a bottle of champagne already opened I don't mind helping to clear it up."
"Okay, understood. Be back in a minute."
Hunter shut his eyes again. When he opened them Jagger was settling himself at his side with a tankard of champagne, a pint glass and a large bedroom ewer that proved to be full of beer.
"Now we shan't be disturbed," said Jagger, filling his glass. "There are just one or two points you might fill in for me if you will."
"Points about what?"
Jagger looked at Hunter for a few seconds without saying anything.
"I see." Hunter lit a cigarette. "What do you want to know?"
"The mechanics, first of all. How you managed to move in and out of here without notice being taken and the rest of it. There's a pretty tight guard on that gate."
"Nothing to it. I drove out of camp after dinner in the ordinary way. I came back in after midnight on foot, having put my car in a field on the other side of the main road. The guard had changed by then and they don't keep a record of how you leave and return, only when and what for. Then I had a quiet lie-down for a couple of hours, after which I went out again by way of the fence. Easy enough for anyone who knows the ground and the habits of the patrol. Next, a pleasant drive to the target area via the place where I'd hidden the rifle, the destruction of St. Jerome's Priory, and a much quicker run to the neighborhood of the mental hospital, where, again, escaping notice was no problem if you knew the place. Dodging Leonard's men in the grounds and round the staff block was terrifyingly easy. Finally, a swift belt back in this direction and participation in the general chaotic comings and goings which, as I reasoned correctly, everybody would be far too busy and bothered to keep a detailed check on."
"That was a risk, that last part. Anybody might have started looking for you at any time, to give you a job to do or whatnot."
"In which case I was somewhere else. In the Army, people are never where they're wanted. It's a condition of life. And the whole thing was a risk. I didn't mind. In fact that was almost the best part. Anyway, I had to go through with it. Things are going wrong for people all the time in such devious and complicated and unlikely ways that as soon as that lorry caught fire and the whole scheme occurred to me I was completely committed. Not to bet on things going unbelievably right for once would have been letting down everything I stand for. I don't know whether that makes any sense."
"Oh yes. Quite a bit of sense. Well, that clears that up nicely. Mm. Another thing that bothered me was the typewriter. I can't figure out how you let it be found. You were in charge of the search of the camp, after all. It would have been dead easy for you to decide to be the one who searched C Company shit-house or wherever you'd hidden the bloody thing."
"What put you on to that?"
"Plain as a pikestaff, old lad. I hadn't been here five minutes before I was quite clear in my own mind that the point of the priory being blown up was that it was a priory. Belonging to God the Father Almighty. So I was looking for somebody who didn't like God the Father Almighty. Then as soon as Leonard shows me that poster about the Anti-Death League and gets the poem off the parson and gives it to me I know I'm looking at more work by the same fellow. And I've narrowed the search down a lot, too. Here."
Screwing up his face and making faint trumpeting noises, Jagger searched his pockets. Finally he produced the piece of paper in question and vainly tried to flatten it out on his thigh.
"Quite a nice piece," he said, "in a rather unshaped colloquial vein. But the unshaped part's deliberate, of course. How long did you spend on it?"
"About twenty minutes."
"I'd have said longer. There's been pains taken, I can tell that. Still, what I'm on about is that, whereas there are a number of illiteracies in spelling, the punctuation is correct all through. Now that's odd, you see. For every twenty people who can spell there's hardly one who can punctuate. Pretty well everyone who can punctuate can spell as a matter of course. So our man isn't really semi-illiterate, he's just pretending to be. Why should he do that? To give the impression that any old potato-peeler or boot-polisher might have written the thing. Right. Now Leonard says he's certain the writer's one of the inner ring, the S1 Group, who's got a fit of the horrors about what he's got to do in Operation Apollo. From some points of view that's a fair enough deduction. But it just struck me that it isn't a necessary one. If you base your reasoning on your subject-matter, your mode of approach and suchlike, you don't quite see what you'd expect to see. You'd expect a fellow who was against the Apollo caper to be going on about men. Generals. Politicians. Scientists. People, that's to say, not the Father Almighty. A bit subtle, that, perhaps, but after all we are dealing with poetry. So I'm looking for an educated man who quite likely isn't in the S1 Group. Then I hear friend Deering telling Leonard that the camp search party turned up a typewriter, and I recall you, as officer in charge, reporting that nothing significant was found, and the typewriter's obviously significant, whatever it was significant of, and I've got you. Mind you, there was plenty of other stuff-you were about when the rifle was pinched, you put Leonard on to Best, you don't like Best, et cetera. But the typewriter was what clinched it for me. Which reminds me. You still haven't said how you let the bloody thing get found."
Hunter laughed silently. "That's very straightforward," he said. "I was pissed when I hid it and I'd already forgotten where by the time I got into bed. Like wiping a slate."
"Mm." Jagger topped up his glass. "The only other thing I'd like you to tell me, that's if you feel like it, is your motive. No. Not your motive. Scrub that. I know your motive. Your occasion. What started you off on your poem and your notes?"
There was a long and virtually total silence. Eventually Hunter said,
"I've never been particularly keen on having to think about things. And on things that make you think about things. You know, like music and all that. Love's another one. I joined the Army specially to get away from them. I will say it worked jolly well for a time. But then quite recently I suddenly found I'd fallen in love with somebody in a more completely disastrous fashion than ever before. At first sight, too. I got as drunk as I could to try to put it behind me. No good. Then the somebody's best friend went and died, and I decided I'd better cry out before I was hurt, when somebody else was hurt, in fact. Hence the poem. Then the iove thing nearly turned out my way, but it didn't at all when it came to it, because the somebody was thinking of the dead friend. That really got me down. Hence the Anti-Death League. Then a friend of mine fell in love and his girl got cancer, as you heard. That more or less finished me off. Hence the rifle and the priory. As a way of voicing some sort of objection. Plus a bit of revenge thrown in."
"It wasn't very practical," said Jagger. "Any of it."
"No, it wasn't. But sometimes you've got to be impractical and illogical and a bit useless, because the only alternative is to do nothing at all, and that would be simply offensive. You just can't let things like this go sliding past without any kind of remark, as if nobody noticed or cared. It won't do."