Then he nodded at Mary Franklin's handbag. 'Typical Spetsnaz, as I said. Turn his clock back fifteen years and you've got another of those clean-cut Russian boys in Afghanistan I've been seeing on Italian newsreels, is what I mean. Only he would have worn his hair longer. And no one from here to Hereford would have given him a second dummy1
glance . . . except maybe the girls.'
Neither Mitchell nor Mary Franklin looked at each other this time.
'Okay.' Richardson accepted their silence. 'So I've come clean on Spetsnaz. And I heard David on the 'phone to you last night, Dr Mitchell. So what have you got for me, then?'
Mitchell didn't fancy that final arrogant "me" any more than he fancied the man himself. And it was more than a simple chalk-and-cheese, like-but-unlike, post-Capri reaction, Audley realized. More simply still, because of his own past and background Mitchell disliked the sum of Peter Richardson, everything he stood for and everything about him, from his distinguished good-looks to the way in which he'd twice abandoned his military career (never mind an equally promising one in intelligence) when it didn't please him sufficiently: that last, for Paul Mitchell, would be a betrayal beside which the man's retirement activities were a mere aberration.
'For you?' Mitchell's lip twisted with distaste.
'For me.' Audley pushed the words between them before Mitchell's irritation got the better of him. 'Have you traced the policeman?'
'Yes.'
'Yes.' Richardson wasn't interested in Mitchell's likes and dislikes. 'Well, seeing as I supplied his name that can't have taxed you much.' He lifted his head slightly. 'He'd be retired dummy1
by now, of course — eh?'
Mitchell ignored him. 'Yes. We've traced the policeman, David.'
'He wouldn't be dead, by any chance?' Richardson refused to be ignored.
'He lives with his widowed sister in a village near Hereford, David,' said Mitchell pointedly. 'We have arranged for you to talk to him this morning.'
Richardson leaned forward. 'Did you talk to him, Dr Mitchell
— last night?'
'Yes, Major.' Mitchell bowed to the urgency in Richardson's voice. 'We got him out of his bed at midnight. And we talked to him.'
'Did you ask him about the spade?'
Mitchell looked at his watch. 'We've got a good half-an-hour's drive, David. Shall we go?'
' Did you ask him about the spade?' Richardson refused to be gainsaid.
Audley nodded to Mitchell.
Mitchell stared at him for a moment, then turned to Richardson again. 'Yes, Major Richardson — we asked him about the spade.'
'And —?'
A stronger gust of wind swirled over and around them, carrying the word away up the valley.
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'We also checked up on your own little accident, in London.
And that was a lot easier. We only had to wake up a succession of irritable civil servants, as well as policemen, and pull rank on them. Plus the Defence of the Realm and the anti-terrorist regulations, and the Third World War.'
Mitchell took his revenge steadily. 'And we established that you'd had an accident which wasn't your fault. As a result of which an Irishman named Murphy was fined £15, with £25
costs, after pleading guilty to careless driving. Although his present whereabouts — and the whereabouts of a million other Murphies —'
'The devil with my accident, Mitchell!' At the third try, Richardson got his word in edgeways. 'What about the spade?'
'The spade?' Mitchell decided not to settle for one small victory, even for the time being. 'That was PC Jenkins, retired. And you know how many Jenkinses there are in Wales — retired and unretired? Even Policemen Jenkinses?
"Daft", they thought I was, at first. And then "bloody daft"
when I told them you'd lost a spade fifteen years ago, maybe.
But now you wanted it back, and —'
'Paul — ' Audley cut him off sharply ' — that's enough. Just tell us about the spade.'
Mitchell looked at him, not so much twitchingly now as tired.
And angry with it. 'Right, David. So ... I won't tell you the rest of it, then — not even when I had to get Henry Jaggard to phone up the Chief Constable? After the Duty Sergeant told dummy1
me to piss off — ?'
Just for a spade! thought Audley. With no poor crooked scythe to go with it — never mind any hammer-and-sickle.
But . . . six men, in two countries, had died because of that spade, maybe. And, but for Jack Butler's "error of judgement", and then Colonel Zimin's possible error, he himself might have been one of them, by God!
'No.' There might come a time to make a joke of this, if they outlived this day, and came safe home: Normandy had been like that. But this was neither the time nor the day. 'Just tell us about the spade.'
'Okay.' Mitchell shrugged at him, and then at Richardson.
'He didn't remember the bloody spade — not at first ... He didn't even remember you, Major — not at first, when we gave him your name, no matter that you remembered his: he thought we were "daft", too.' Against all the odds, Mitchell brightened slightly. 'But then, in the end, he did remember.
Only not because of you, Major. It was the owners of the spade he remembered. Because they were unfinished business — that's what he called them: "unfinished business"
— '
'What owners?' Richardson was calm now, almost ingratiatingly so.
'The owners.' Just as suddenly, Mitchell forgot to be angry.
'The owners of the crashed van you reported — ? It was their van . . . and they'd reclaimed it. And then they came back for their spade — ' Now he was calm too. 'Yes — ?'
dummy1
'Were they the drivers?' Richardson shook his head. 'When I came on that van, it was on its side, in the road, with no one in it. And the windscreen was broken — it had hit the bank, and turned over . . . And there was blood all over the front seats. And . . . there was the spade there — on the floor — ?'
'So you called the police, like a good citizen.' Mitchell nodded. 'But the owners said it was stolen. And the police never found the drivers. But that was what PC Jenkins remembered, eventually: he thought they'd be in the local hospital, cut-and-bruised ... or, preferably, worse. Like, detained for observation, with suspected fractures, to make it easy for him. But they weren't . . . which he thought was odd.
But. . . the spade wasn't odd, Major.'
Richardson frowned at him. 'But I told him to show it to his boss — to find out who it belonged to. I told him what he ought to do, in fact, damn it!'
'Well, he did find out that.' Mitchell stared back at him defiantly. "The owners came in to collect it. And he only remembered that because he already knew them: they were a couple of "general dealers" from Abergavenny. Two right old lags he'd known for years . . . receiving stolen property, plus a bit of sheep-stealing, and all that. And he'd reckoned at first, once he'd traced the ownership of the van, that they'd be the ones who'd turn up black-and-blue — that they'd both been pissed when they crashed the van, and had run off so that they could sober up and establish an alibi . . . Which they had, of course —had an alibi: they said the van had been dummy1
nicked from their yard, and they didn't even know it was gone until the police phoned them up.' He shrugged again.
'So there wasn't anything he could do then. Because they clearly hadn't been bashed-up in any accident — not on that occasion, anyway.'
'Not on ... that occasion?'
'Uh-huh.' Mitchell grinned. "The real reason why he remembers the pair of them was that he did get 'em in the end — for drunk-driving, that is.' He nodded. 'It was about eighteen months afterwards. Only this time they ran out of road in a more public place, not on a little back-road. And this time it wasn't a van they were in — it was a damn great three-year-old Jaguar. Which turned out to be theirs. And that also surprised him, because they had been near-bankrupt for years. But he reckoned they must have pulled off a big burglary somewhere off his patch, probably over in England, and got clean away with it. Which was another reason why he started to remember everything. Because it narked him that they were able to pay the drunk-driving fine so easily, after the magistrates threw the book at them. And not even the five-year driving disqualification hurt them, either. Because they then de-camped off to Spain after that, to the "Costa del Crime" where all the rich villains go. While the poor old honest PC Jenkins himself retired on his police pension to keep house with his sister — ' Mitchell broke off as he realized that Richardson was no longer listening to him, but was nodding to Audley.