Soldier No More (49 page)

“If I could have squeezed out through that damned hole, then I would have … But I couldn’t, so I didn’t have any choice … But you had a choice,” said Audley to the garden.

Roche realised that Audley was talking about a debt of his own, not something Major Roche had left unpaid behind him.

“Also you warned d’Auberon. And I know that because I phoned him later that night, to tell him to lie low … But you’d already warned him. And you didn’t have to do that either …”

Roche felt light-headed. “But you don’t like d’Auberon—“

“No … Or, more accurately, we don’t like each other—there’s too much history between us, ancient as well as modern … And he’s a most intractably honourable man, and he thinks I’m not… Perhaps he’s right, too.” The immense shoulders flexed under their width of expensive broadcloth. “Though, oddly enough, if he’d given me those wretched papers of his I’d never have turned them over to Fred Clinton—not in a thousand years…”

A thousand years?

It is knightly to keep faith
—
even after a thousand years
!

Roche understood at last what he had never really believed until now. And more than that—that Genghis Khan had been right, and Wimpy had been right too: that Clinton was recruiting trouble—that where he had acted from some irrational urge which he still didn’t understand, this man’s code of conduct was already chiselled in stone, for better or worse, regardless of intelligent self-interest.

And d’Auberon too?

So the French and Clinton—and the British—had both got their bad bargains, to screw up the commonsense order of things … the French already, and the British in due course, as Genghis Khan had forecast—

But he was getting his benefit
now
, against the odds, because of it. And that was the only thing that mattered
now
, never mind a thousand years!

Audley swung round. “You probably don’t understand a word I’m saying. But it’s of no consequence, it’s purely a private matter between me and myself.”

He looked at Roche, and dismissed him, and started past the foot of the bed, but then halted with his hand on the door-knob, and turned back.

“The trouble with you, Roche, is … you’ve always been a victim—at least, right from the time that clever little Russian bitch fixed you up in Japan—and we’ve got a picture of her, large as life, in Dzerzhinsky Street three months after she drowned herself—Clinton has, anyway.”

Beyond pain there was nothing. It wasn’t very different from falling under a Delaroche Royale:
nothing
couldn’t hurt—

“But you weren’t a victim that evening—you were all your own man. So if anyone comes to you now, and tries to change that, I’ve given you more than enough to put them down—
right
?”

Nothing still couldn’t hurt.

Audley almost turned away, into the doorway he had opened for himself, but then slipped his hand into his pocket before he could complete the turn.

“Don’t let the buggers get you down, eh?” He flipped a letter on to the bed, beside Roche’s hand.

Before he summoned up the strength to touch the letter, Roche saw that someone had already opened it for him. But that was to be expected.

It was funny about Julie: once it had been said out loud it was as though he had always known it, but had merely hidden it from himself as he had tried to hide so many other things. So the words had no echo: they were said and done with, leaving nothing more to say that he didn’t already know.

My own dearest David
—

There was a nice breathless Lexy-sound about her proposals for their future, even though she’d got him all wrong. But then so had Audley—and so had everyone.

Also … it did rather look as though he was about to become a victim again.

But this time round that didn’t seem such an unhappy fate.

The End