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"That just about wraps it up — eh, David?'
'The spade — ' began Mitchell sharply. But then he broke off again as he began to interpret his own story.
'They were sent to collect it.' Richardson stared through Audley. "They must have spotted me — someone must have spotted me ... After all, I was hanging round for about an hour or more, that afternoon . . . late afternoon, early evening
— I was late for dinner with . . . my friends at Pen-y-ffin.' He focused on Audley again. 'Being a good citizen! This is what I get for being a good citizen, David!' But there was no amusement in the reflection, only bitterness. And then the glazed stare returned. "The Russians couldn't have known for sure that I'd spotted it. So they had nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain, by sending their two locals to pick it up ... But they couldn't be sure — ' He stopped as abruptly as Mitchell had done. And then his face became stone as his teeth clamped together. 'So that wraps it up.'
It did just about wrap it up, thought Audley — and not "just about", either: the two venal "locals" (always go for professional petty criminals, that was what the book laid down: they were more easily scared into absolute obedience if you chose them carefully, balancing their relative lack of intelligence against their cost-effective greed and more limited ambition — and, most of all, the limits of their curiosity!); and, indeed, the proof-of-that-pudding was there in this whole sequence of dusty events from long ago, from a minor accident on the Welsh border, via another one in a dummy1
London street, to the presumed suicide of an elderly and impoverished Italian lady in her heavily-mortgaged palazzo on the Amalfi coast. Only, until now, it had been an unconnected sequence. And now that it was connected it looked quite different. 'Yes, I suppose it does, Peter. So far, anyway.'
'Wraps up what?' Mary Franklin looked from Richardson to Audley, understandably irritated by them both.
'I don't really need to see PC Plod — Constable Jenkins.'
Richardson ignored her. 'Like I said last night, David . . . our best bet is the SAS at Hereford. All this territory is theirs, pretty much — it used to be, anyway. From the Forest of Dean and the Black Mountains, northwards . . . And they'll have contingency plans, you can bet — for the IRA, if not the Russians. And — '
' Dr Audley!' Mary Franklin had graduated from annoyance to anger. 'What is all this about?'
'The spade, Mary.' It was Mitchell who spoke, nodding to her as he did so. 'Major Richardson's little all-purpose spade. That's what it's all about — eh, David?'
Little spade — Mitchell had got there, then!
Little all-purpose spade, from long ago, carelessly lost —
criminal carelessness, that would have been. But quickly recovered, nevertheless. And, meanwhile, that original mixture of bad-luck-accident and criminal carelessness had been attended to with the appropriate antidote of well-dummy1
calculated ruthlessness —
'Every Russian soldier has a spade.' Mitchell nodded to her agaon, almost dreamily. 'Eh, David?'
It wasn't really surprising that Mitchell had got there on his own, any more than Mary Franklin's present incredulity was unsurprising. Getting there was what they were both paid to do, but Mitchell's private obsession with all things military had given him the edge this time. Indeed, if he hadn't been so stretched by other events, and so plain dog-tired, he might have got there last night, when the little all-purpose spade had surfaced again, at last.
'It was a Russian spade?' Spades, evidently, were tools in garden-sheds to Mary Franklin, with which gardeners dug gardens. 'How do you know — ?' She spread the question among them. Only now she was less angry and surprised than frankly curious, to her credit.
'A Spetsnaz' spade?' This time, at last, Mitchell addressed Richardson. But it wasn't really a question: Mitchell was moving on already, to unwrap what had been wrapped up, with all the excitement of understanding animating him, after all his recent humiliations, through not-knowing what was happening down to having to ask for help from Henry Jaggard last night, when all else had failed.
'What's a Spetsnaz spade?' Mary Franklin was on the same road now, but still at its beginning.
'Same as a Russian army spade, Mary.' Mitchell still dummy1
concentrated on Richardson. 'Every Russian soldier's most important possession, after his Kalashnikov: the moment he stops shooting, he starts digging. Or paddling. Or cutting up his bread. Or ... he sharpens it up, just in case?' Now it was Richardson who got the nod. This one would have been Spetsnaz-sharp — right?' Then Mary Franklin got her nod again, at last. 'That's for throwing, Mary. Because it's so well balanced that it's also one hell-of-a-weapon, in its own right — ' Then Audley himself got the rest of the nod ' — the best entrenching tool since the Romans, David? Isn't there some ancient text about a Legion driving off the barbarians with their spades, when they were attacked while building one of their forts, eh? You're our resident Roman expert — ?'
'And you are our resident Spetsnaz expert, Dr Mitchell?'
Richardson's voice had lost all of its animosity. 'As my successor?' But then he smiled his old easy smile at Mary Franklin. 'Dr Mitchell is absolutely right, Miss Franklin: it was a razor-sharp little spade I found. And it was . . . really, quite distinctive. Because it's a ruler, to measure . . .
whatever needs to be measured — the length of the handle, and the length and breadth of the blade: 32 plus 18 equals 50, by 18 ... centimetres of course. And matt green, overall.'