And that, of course, was adding injury to insult: bad enough for some anonymous Home Office official to descend on a hardworking police force empowered to ask questions without the obligation of answering any in the midst of a stalled murder case, implying dissatisfaction, in high places; but to detach a useful officer from the duty rota when the force was already overstretched—all forces were overstretched—that had to be beyond the bloody limit.
Yet Weston still appeared cool enough and that was no good at all for the sort of answers that were needed. Somehow he had to be made to drop his defences. But pulling rank wouldn't achieve that any more than a straight appeal for help, which would only be despised.
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He realised suddenly that he was staring fixedly at Weston, and that Weston was returning the stare with interest. In another moment they would be in a staring match.
"I gather he was your man on the spot." He shifted the stare to the sergeant. "In fact, very much on the spot."
He took in the younger man in detail for the first time.
Younger was right; over the years he had grown accustomed to the truth of the cliché that police constables grew younger and younger as one advanced into senility. But now the sergeants were growing younger too: if Weston passed as a middle-aged country doctor, Sergeant Digby could have been a first-year medical student, no longer wholly innocent but as yet unmarked by his profession.
Another baby to make him feel old and jealous.
And another clever baby, if what the Brigadier had said was to be believed.
"You'll have read his statement, then. And the others."
Weston's voice cut through his line of thought.
"His statement?" Audley frowned stupidly. Maybe they weren't babies after all—a month of humid Washington and a few hours' flying, and he couldn't keep his mind on the job for five consecutive minutes. Maybe they weren't babies at all
—maybe he must just be getting too old.
Weston heaved a carefully-controlled breath. "Transcripts of all the statements taken in the course of the investigation so far have been sent to the Home Secretary." He paused, dummy5
watching Audley impassively. "I assume you've studied them, sir."
Statements.
Of course there had been statements. Dozens of statements, hundreds of statements. Names and occupations and places and times and facts. Statements to be checked and cross-checked and double-checked. Statements to be read and re-read and sieved and strained and refined.
That was what a murder investigation was: not a brilliant tour de force by a Sherlock Holmes, but an organised routine carried out by dozens of men and women working sixteen hours a day.
Of course there would be statements. In fact, with the Ratcliffe investigation the way it was that was all there would be at this moment. Just statements.
And nine times out of ten the police could be pretty sure, that somewhere in that mass of paper was the name they wanted, and that if it was there they would get to it in the end. Not by luck—the whole system was built to eliminate luck as far as possible, because luck had to be arbitrarily good or bad in equal proportions—but by the cold mathematics of routine multiplied by team work multiplied by sixteen hours a day.
Only this had to be the tenth time; the time when there was no name and all the multiplication was ruined by a final zero factor. And if Superintendent Weston was half as good a policeman as Cox believed him to be, then he would know it.
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The trick was to make him admit it. ...
Why not the truth? thought Audley suddenly.
He smiled at Weston. "No. I haven't read any statements."
"No . . . sir?" Weston's impassivity was a work of high art.
"Not one single word." The truth was supposed to set men free, perhaps it might set them both free now. "Just two newspaper reports."
Weston continued to stare at him expressionlessly, reserving his right to burst into laughter or tears.
"Four hours ago ..." Audley consulted his watch casually "...
actually rather less than four hours ago ... I'd never even heard of either the Ratcliffe family or Swine Brook Field. As a matter of fact I was on a jet from New York four hours ago—
minding my own business."
At last the hint of an emotion showed on Weston's face: one corner of his mouth twitched.
"But now you have to mind ours for us?"
"It does rather look that way." Audley nodded slowly, then converted the nod into a negative shake. "But I wouldn't have read the statements anyway."
"No?" The twitch became the beginning of—it might be a snarl or it might be a smile.
"No." The implications of that he had to let Weston work out for himself: it had to be either an insult or a vote of confidence, according to whether Cox's assessment was dummy5
wrong or right.
A smile.
"Quite right too. Take you a week to read—and then you'd only be where we are."
Cox had been right.
"Which is nowhere?"
"Which is nowhere." The smile completed its journey and then vanished. "And you work for the Home Office, Dr.
Audley—is that right?"
Polite disbelief. Am I right? meaning I am wrong, aren't I?
Cox had understated the reality.
"Does that matter, Superintendent?"
"Not to me, sir. To my sergeant it might, I'm thinking."
Audley flicked a glance at the sergeant, to find that he too was being carefully scrutinised. He wondered whether the sergeant was thinking he's old for this job, just as he'd been thinking a few moments before how very young the sergeant was. But then the sergeant could hardly know what the job was, of course.
And that was one aspect of the truth which must be ducked.
"I'll try not to keep him too long."
"No skin off my nose. He isn't really one of mine, not yet."
"Not . . . one of yours?"
"He's been attached to me for this case.
Audley frowned. "You mean he's not CID?"
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"He has been. And he will be again before I'm very much older. But at this moment he's uniform branch."
They were up to the second of the two things he needed from the Superintendent before he had asked the first vital question. But Weston had already half answered that with his suspicion that Audley wasn't just a Home Office busybody: clearly he'd already smelt a rat in the Ratcliffe case.
"Tell me about him, Superintendent."
"Sergeant Digby?" Weston's face hardened. "He's a good copper. With the makings of a very good one."
"He looks very young ... to be a sergeant."
"You think so?" Weston managed to look amused without softening his expression. "This time next year he'll be an inspector."
Well, well! thought Audley. But then—why not? The police fought an unending war against crime, and in war the company commanders were often no older than Sergeant Digby. No doubt there'd been plenty of fresh-faced young captains-of-horse in Cromwell's panzers, the New Model Army.
"Indeed?" And, come to that, it didn't take much imagination to turn Paul Mitchell into a hard-faced young colonel, not yet out of his twenties. Ruthlessness had never been the prerogative of old age, after all.
"Scholarship boy, Henry Digby was— Fenton Grammar dummy5
School, before it went comprehensive." Pride and regret were evenly distributed in Weston's voice. "And they went for flyers then, too. Eleven 'O' levels he had, and three 'A' levels—
good ones, too. Could have gone to university for the asking, and his mother wanted him to. A teacher, that's what she had in mind for him."
"But he wanted to be a policeman?" Familiar pattern, even if the ambition was eccentric: all those examination honours were no good if mother couldn't pass her psychology test.
Likely she'd have stood a better chance of making a teacher of him if she'd insisted on helmet and handcuffs.