"Very well—couldn't. In this context it amounts to the same thing."
"Not at all. It amounts to the opposite, Minister."
The Minister frowned. "Are you suggesting that 'couldn't'
means 'could'?"
"No. I'm saying that 'couldn't' means did." Audley sat back.
"Not in law, of course. Otherwise the editor would be in trouble now. But we're not a nation of lawyers anyway, Minister. We're a nation of detective story readers."
"So?"
"So we know a perfect crime when we see one—means, motive, but no opportunity. The locked room, the flawless alibi, the unshakeable eye-witness. And Charlie Ratcliffe has seven thousand eye-witnesses to testify that he didn't do it, has he not?"
The Minister nodded again, clearly puzzled. "Yes."
dummy5
"Right. But everyone knows exactly what Hercule Poirot would say to that: 'Here is a man with seven thousand witnesses to his innocence, so my little grey cells tell me that he is the guilty one, mes enfants. Seven thousand witnesses must be wrong.'"
Audley was suddenly aware that he was trying to out-shout a jumbo jet which had stolen up on him and now seemed to be passing ten feet above his head. He noticed also that Stocker was smiling.
The Minister waited until the jet thunder had faded. "So what do your little grey cells tell you?"
It was time to consult his thumbs again, thought Audley.
Stocker's smile had faded with the jet engines, but the memory of it still reverberated. "That I'm in the process of being conned."
"You ... are being conned?" The Minister cocked his head on one side. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Dr. Audley."
"Murder is for policemen, Minister— I've already said so. If you want me to ... pin the rap on Charlie Ratcliffe I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I won't do it."
"Won't?" The Minister's voice was silky.
"Can't."
"You think he's innocent, then?"
"On the contrary. You've already told me he's guilty. I wouldn't dream of disbelieving you, Minister."
"And the seven thousand witnesses?"
dummy5
Audley shook his head. "I don't mean he did it himself—as I'm sure you didn't either. But for one per cent of £2½
million I could put out a contract on anyone you care to name
—or let's say two per cent, inflation being what it is ... No, I'm sure he's guilty. But I'm also sure that I'm not the man to prove it."
"Why not?"
"I've told you. First, it's not my skill. Finding enough proof to convince twelve good men and true isn't something I've ever had to do, I wouldn't know where to start, never mind finish.
"And second, it's a police job. It is their skill—they know how to do it, and they're damn good at it, too. If it can be done, they'll do it—and if they can't do it then I can't do it." He stared hard at the Minister. "And since you're here now I must assume that they can't."
The Minister relaxed, with just the ghost of a smile edging his mouth. "A fair assumption. But you haven't taken your logic quite far enough." The smile grew. "And that is your skill, I gather."
It was an open invitation to go straight to the heart of the matter, thought Audley. But for some reason the Minister was unwilling to spell it out, but wanted Audley himself to deduce it.
He stared out of the car window at the crab-apple tree in the hedgerow. There was a crab like that in the spinney behind his own kitchen garden wall at home, and like this one it was dummy5
laden with fruit. The late frost and the bullfinches had played havoc with his carefully tended Blenheims and Cox's Orange Pippins, but the devil himself looked after the crab-apples.
And if what the Minister said was true then it looked as if the devil had kept a friendly eye on Charlie Ratcliffe too.
So they were morally certain that Charlie Ratcliffe was the killer, or at least the killer's paymaster, but they couldn't prove it. But that had happened before and would happen again: there were some you won and some you lost, and there was no use weeping about it. Those were the ones you notched up to experience, hoping that the Lord of the Old Testament would keep His promise about repayment in His own time.
But Ministers of the Crown had no time to worry about such things in any case. Murderers caught and murderers free could only be statistics to them. All murderers were equal before the law.
Even revolutionary murderers.
Audley looked back at the Minister as innocently as he could.
"Tell me about Charlie Ratcliffe, Minister. I'm afraid I'm not very well up in revolution at the moment."
Stocker fished a yellow folder out of his brief-case. "Charlie Ratcliffe, David," he said.
Audley accepted the folder. It was crisp and new, like the typescript within it.
Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe.
dummy5
Interesting, that. Despite battle and murder, and Puritan revolutions and Royalist restoration, and Protestant revolution and Hanoverian succession, and industrial revolution and democratic succession, and the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars and the rise and fall of the Labour Party and Trades Union succession . . . despite all that there was still a Steyning in possession of Standingham Castle after over three centuries of accelerating social change.
They must be a shrewd, tough line, the Steynings.
The Steyning-Ratcliffes.
Charlie Ratcliffe.
He felt the smooth, thick paper under his fingers. That was interesting too—if anything even more interesting. Not Department paper and not a departmental typewriter. Not a photocopy from the Special Records or a typist's copy of a print-out from the Central Computer. But, for a bet, if he now called for a photocopy on a print-out from anywhere else, then this would be what he would get.
Well, they had been careless—
Born April 23, 1949—
A mere baby, relatively speaking.
—careless. Which was all the more reason why he must not be careless in his turn and ask them the direct question that was on the tip of his tongue: what had there been in the original file on Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe that wasn't dummy5
fit for David Audley's eyes?
Much better to hold on to that question. So long as it remained unanswered there would be an area of uncertainty.
But there were ways and means of dealing with that, and as long as it remained officially unasked he had a nice little excuse with which to account for future failure.
Educated at—
He read the typed pages through carefully. Until the last one they contained nothing of unique, or even very special, interest; Charlie Ratcliffe was no different from his fellow activists among the privileged youth of the West, from the Berlin Wall to the Golden Gate, the product and victim of his age.
Born a century earlier he might have carried the flag or the Gospel into darkest Africa. Born fifty years later—or twenty-five years after that—he might just have managed to get his name on the village war memorial, with the lost generations of First World War subalterns and Second World War bomber crews.
But Born April 23, 1949 he had become the founder and editor of The Red Rat, which appeared to advocate an odd mixture of perfect peace and bloody revolution, in which all men not hanging from lamp-posts were brothers.
"Well . . ." he closed the folder and met the Minister's stare again "... I would have thought you'd have done better to enlist a good team of sharp lawyers rather than me, dummy5
Minister."
"Why lawyers?"
"You don't want young Charlie to get his hands on his ton of gold. And the easiest way to do that would be to prove it isn't his."
The Minister nodded. "And how would we do that, Dr.
Audley?"
Audley shrugged. "I'm not a lawyer. But . . ."
"But?"