"Don't ask me, that's your department, I only-"
"Stop trying to set up a monopoly in feeling. The first thing I could make out over there was that the doctor was preparing to give the man an injection that would make him unconscious in seconds. He gave him it. There was nothing I could do after that, because he'll probably never recover consciousness, and if he does it's unlikely he'd be able to take in what I said or even what I was."
"But he might."
Naidu got out of the passenger's seat and walked past them up the road away from the accident.
"Exactly," said Ayscue to Churchill, "and that above all is why I'm over here instead of over there. What's he going to think if he wakes up and sees me? Use your imagination, James. How would you feel if you came to yourself in a hospital bed with a man in a dog-collar bending over you and telling you to be of good cheer? You'd know where you were due next all right. Agreed?"
Churchill nodded.
"If I had any reason to suppose that that boy believed in God then I wouldn't have come away. But these days the chances are very much against any such thing. And I couldn't ask him. I just couldn't risk it, James. You see that, don't you?"
Churchill nodded again.
"Come on."
"I'm sorry, Willie," said Churchill as they drove away.
"That's all right. We'd better both apologize to Moti. I'm afraid we may have shocked him a little."
"Because of what?"
"Inappropriate behavior."
They picked up Naidu and a few minutes later turned right towards the camp, first pausing to allow a heavy mobile crane to pass in the opposite direction.
Captain Leonard put on his mess-jacket and stood while Deering, his batman, fastened the buttons, using a thin cloth so as not to spoil the polish on the brass.
The jacket was of an unusual deep ultramarine, the mark of an honor awarded to the 17th Dragoons, Leonard's regiment, as a result of an incident in the Peninsular War when a squadron of them had been able to take an enemy force in the rear by swimming, horses and all, across an arm of the Mediterranean. The regiment was colloquially known as the Sailors in consequence. Nowadays it was a reconnaissance unit equipped with scout cars and light tanks, but had remained, as far as its officers were concerned, an abode of the landowning families. It was for this reason that Leonard's masters in Whitehall had chosen it as his cover, explaining rather offensively that nobody would suspect an officer in the Sailors of being anything but what he seemed. In a different mood, those masters had undone a fair part of this precaution by advising Leonard to divulge strong periodic hints about his real job, on the new-found principle-recently advertised to Hunter-that a security system works best when the opposition know it to be at work and may react significantly to that knowledge. Many of the officers and men in the camp had heard that Leonard was not really a soldier at all but some sort of agent of military counter-intelligence assigned to prevent anyone outside from learning what No. 6 Headquarters Administration Battalion was actually up to.
Although he had never trained or served with the Sailors, had never been near them except to be given dinner and shown round once at their depot, Leonard's attention to his turnout as one of them would have been judged adequate even by the Vice-President of their Mess. He pointed out various imperfections-a protruding thread at the edge of the revers, a fleck of dried metal-polish near a buttonhole-which Deering went some way towards repairing. Then, with the care of a cadet about to go on guard-mounting, Leonard examined himself in the full-length triple-paneled tailor's glass he took wherever his masters sent him.
The man inside the jacket and the close-fitting scarlet trousers with ultramarine stripe was forty years old. He had retreating black hair that was still thick at the sides and back, and a sallow complexion darkened round the mouth by beard showing under the skin. When he spoke, it was with a perpetual air of urgency stemming in part from the guttural sound he regularly substituted for the letter R. He said urgently now,
"Brush."
Deering walked not very slowly round his officer dabbing at his jacket with a clothes-brush, dislodging a few of the fallen hairs and specks of lint but merely changing the position of most.
"Sticky tape's the thing really."
"You should have thought of that before."
"Yes, sir."
With a forgiving smile, Leonard crossed to the rosewood dressing-table that he had not had to bring with him. Such pieces as this and the imposing mahogany tallboy, tall enough almost to touch the beams overhead, harked back to the days when the Mess had functioned as a farmhouse. The place was large enough to accommodate all the unit's officers above the rank of captain, plus a few deemed to qualify for comfort on special grounds: the Adjutant, Hunter, as administration officer, Leonard himself, who had explained that he needed to be at the center of things. Had he not thought to do so he might have found himself bedding down in an outhouse with a couple of subalterns, or even trying to live in one of the box-shaped, pastel-colored huts that had recently been run up in a nearby meadow and rang with portable radios eighteen hours a day.
He now picked up a red leather spectacle-case, quickly removed the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing, substituted a pair of pince-nez, and closed the case with a loud snap, his eyes steadily on Deering throughout. The effect of the change was to replace the semblance of an ambitious schoolmaster with that of a minor Slavic bureaucrat.
"Well, Deering, any news?"
This was the signal for the daily report on gossip and rumor within the camp. Only a short acquaintance with the Army had been needed to teach Leonard the usefulness of batmen as confidants, eavesdroppers and innocent over-hearers. He had seen exceptional intelligence-value of this sort in Deering as soon as the Mess Sergeant recommended him, and that value had proved itself ever since. There was something about the man that he sympathized with more personally, too. Untidy and casual and sometimes faintly impertinent he might be, but his contempt for the politicians supposedly in charge of national security, combined with his respect for those few who (like Leonard) were really doing something about it, was as proper as it was rare, and would have been totally admirable if expressed in a better accent.
Losing no time in displaying his less attractive side, Deering took half a cigarette from his trouser pocket and lit it. He sniffed twice and said,
"The padre's been on the prowl again."
"Are you sure?"
"See how it strikes you. About two A.M. Coates is parked in the forecourt waiting to take the Colonel's guest home when he sees someone creeping across that bit of meadow towards the huts. Whoever it is goes into one of the ones near the far end-Coates can't be sure which one, but that's where Ayscue's hut is. It was him all right, no doubt about it."
"What do you mean, no doubt about it?" Leonard spoke sharply. A conversation about the work of the unit he had had with Ayscue the previous week had convinced him that no suspicion of spying could be attached here, and the idea of having to reopen a closed file was disagreeable to him. "A couple of the Indians have got huts down that end. It might have been one of them, or Churchill, or almost anybody."
"Churchill and the Indians don't keep dogs. Ayscue does. If it had been anyone else but him, that bloody Alsatian bitch of his would have cracked on like it does whenever you go near it. But there wasn't a peep out of the pooch. I asked Coates particularly. That proves it, see. I remember reading a story about that somewhere, you know, the case of the dog that didn't bark."