Here Be Monsters (15 page)

‘If you think you did … tell her.’ Audley didn’t look up. ‘After all this time it’s a bit late to agonize. If that’s what you’re doing.’

‘Yes.’ Sir Peter gave Audley a Xenophon look. ‘All right, Miss Loftus. He wants me to remember, so I will.’ He stared at her, sorting his memories into separate columns, adding and subtracting to prepare his balance sheet. ‘I wasn’t in the process of resigning -I had already resigned. And I wasn’t buying claret. By then I was clerking for this Greek, who had cornered a piece of the tanker tonnage, and was cashing in on it. And I was learning Arabic at evening classes … When
he
came out of the woodwork.’ He nodded towards Audley.

‘1958?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Audley turned the page of his book.

‘1958—I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake, somewhere down the line: that I should have read Arabic at Cambridge, or stayed in the Foreign Office.’ A trace of lingering bitterness still showed in his voice. ‘And then he turned up, with what seemed like a fool question. Except he had a Special Branch man in tow—or a secret policeman of some heavier variety. So it didn’t seem like a silly question at the time.’ He gave Audley another look. ‘You scared me, David.’

‘I wasn’t after you.’ Audley turned another page. ‘Not particularly.’

‘It didn’t seem like that.’ Sir Peter came back to her. ‘He wanted to know where I’d been on holiday, the summer before.’

‘And you didn’t appear too scared, actually,’ murmured Audley.

‘But I was.’

‘It didn’t stop you telling me—to go bowl my hoop elsewhere,’ said Audley mildly. ‘The first time, anyway.’ He raised his eyes to Elizabeth. ‘He wasn’t helpful the first time.’

‘But he came back a second time—in working hours, with the same policeman in attendance—right there in the middle of the Greek’s office!’ The recollection of the second time, even in this customized room on the pinnacle of the power and glory of Xenophon Oil, made Sir Peter wince. ‘The Greek damn near sacked me on the spot … Which, with what he was doing—the way he was sailing his tankers close to the wind—you could hardly blame him … To have one of Sir Frederick Clinton’s bright young men interrogating one of his clerks—‘ For a fraction of a second the Master of Xenophon became the Greek’s clerk again in his memory ‘—which was what saved me, I suppose.’

‘Huh!’ Audley closed the book. ‘Stavros didn’t quite know how much
you
knew, eh?’

Sir Peter nodded. ‘He told me he’d see me right if I kept my mouth shut about his business.’

‘And you could continue to date his daughter?’ Audley cocked a knowing eye.

‘That too,’ agreed Sir Peter evenly. ‘But if it didn’t concern his business I’d better tell you what you wanted to know, or go and register at the nearest Labour Exchange.’

‘And not continue to date his daughter?’ Audley matched agreements. ‘I was rather depending on that to open you up.’

It was exactly as David Audley’s wife always said—had said from their very first meeting:
When David plays, if you want to play with him, you had better learn to play dirty. Because that
’
s the way he plays
!

Sir Peter looked as though he was beginning to remember how much he had once disliked Audley: the two men studied each other in silence, each estimating and re-estimating what they observed, each aware that the other had put on weight and muscle since 1958, but neither quite sure now who had the edge on the other if it came to trouble-making.

‘Your new boss is that military fellow—Butler, is it?’ Sir Peter changed the subject casually. ‘Looks a bit stupid, but isn’t, by all accounts?’

‘That’s right.’ Audley accepted the change mildly. ‘Right both times. Do you know him?’

‘Not really. I knew old Sir Frederick much better.’ Sir Peter smiled. ‘And your economics fellow better still -Neville Macready … Do you see much of him?’

‘As little as possible.’ Audley returned the smile.

Elizabeth had been half-way to thinking
the tortoise and the armadillo
, but those two smiles amended the image. It was more like
the elderly shark and the middle-aged tiger
—
and each was showing its teeth.

‘A slightly surprising appointment, wasn’t it?’ The tiger tested the depth of the water with a provocative paw. ‘Butler, I mean—?’

‘Very surprising, more like.’ Audley nodded, but then looked away towards the unfinished line of books as though the subject was beginning to bore him. ‘It should have been Oliver St John Latimer, if some bastard hadn’t queered his pitch. He was the obvious choice.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Fascination got the better of Sir Peter. ‘Was that Macready?’

‘No-oo … ’ Audley pounced on a tattered paperback. ‘
Europe and the Czechs
! That’s a very early Penguin!’ He handled the antique paperback reverently. ‘Macready hates Latimer, but it certainly wasn’t Mac.’

‘No?’ Sir Peter echoed the rejection of his first candidate doubtfully.

‘No.’ Audley replaced the fragile heirloom. ‘That was one of your ‘58 library. I remember now. And as you never throw books out there should be a copy of
If Hitler Comes
somewhere along here—‘ Audley moved further along’—
ah
!’

Elizabeth began to understand the nature of the exchange. If Sir Peter Barrie knew so much about the byzantine internal politics of the department then he was not just name-dropping to warn Audley of his influence in high places. For, if he knew that much, he must also know that Audley himself had been the other front runner—indeed, the odds-on favourite, if Paul’s assessment had been correct. So that ‘slightly surprising appointment’ guess had been cruelly barbed.

Audley looked up. ‘Come on, Peter!’

Sir Peter frowned. ‘It can’t have been that RAF fellow—the one who married the Ryle woman, after Ryle divorced her—?’

‘Hugh? Good God, no!’ Audley grunted contemptuously. ‘But I didn’t mean that, my dear chap … it was
me
, of course, if you must know—I was the bastard—I can’t abide the egregious Oliver, so I put in the boot much the same way as you did with old Haddock. Or maybe not in
exactly
the same way. But I did queer his pitch sufficiently. And Jack Butler is my daughter’s godfather, you know—‘ He gave the tiger a huge shark-grin ‘—or perhaps you didn’t know? But it doesn’t matter anyway, because that isn’t what I mean.’ The shark-grin vanished. ‘What I meant was for you to stop pissing around, Peter, and start telling our Miss Loftus about your eternal triangle—you and old Haddock and the fair Philadelphia, eh?’

Elizabeth just caught the dying glow of the flash of hate, beyond that old unforgotten dislike, which momentarily illuminated Sir Peter’s face, as she turned towards him. Or was it pain—it was gone so quickly that she couldn’t be sure.

‘The fair Delphi—“
Delphi
”
, was it?’ Audley’s voice came from outside her range of vision, casually seeking confirmation on the surface, but evil with certainty underneath. ‘They both worshipped at the same shrine, Elizabeth. So they both asked for an answer from the Delphic oracle: “Who loves me?”—
Philadelphia
Marsh
, only and beloved daughter of Abe Marsh,
ci-devant
Abraham Marx, no relative of either Karl or Groucho or Spencer.’

Whatever it had been, it was pain now.

‘But they each received an equivocal answer.’ Audley only continued when it was evident that Sir Peter had nothing to say. ‘Only … Haddock was a classicist, so he knew that when the oracle at Delphi said “No”, that didn’t necessarily mean the same thing. But poor old Peter Barrie wasn’t a classicist, so he thought “Yes” meant “Yes”.’

‘
No!
’
Interrogation would never have wrung that pain from the man, not with the whole of Xenophon’s green-and-gold tower beneath him, thought Elizabeth. And Audley hadn’t tried to interrogate him.

‘That was the way it was.’ Audley knew when he was on a winner. ‘They were both after the same girl. And Haddock won.’ He paused, but not long enough to allow any objection. ‘So his good friend shopped him.’

‘That was
not
the way it was—and you know it.’ Sir Peter registered his objection too late. ‘You’ve already said as much yourself.’

‘Oh—sure! The first tirne I twisted your arm you wouldn’t talk. But when the Greek twisted your arm … then you gave me Haddock. So you’d sorted out your priorities by then—right?’

Sir Peter Barrie looked at her for a long moment, which she realized was the moment Audley had been working towards from the beginning.

‘Miss Loftus … in a perverse way he’s right—the truth, the whole truth … and everything but the truth … that’s how he’s right.’

She felt for him, recalling the same division of truth which Father’s mourners had delivered and withheld at his funeral, as they had briefly held her hand, with the rain dripping from their caps, or their hats, or their umbrellas—those who knew him, some of them old shipmates, and those who only knew him from his medals and the naval annals and afterwards: all of them had possessed a piece of that truth, and pehaps she herself only knew a part of it, after all.

The truth was that the truth always had one more dimension than even the most complete profile imagined. ‘Yes, Sir Peter?’

‘I don’t really know what you want. But if you want me to shop him now, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Because I think I loved them both, Miss Loftus.’

Past tense—
loved
! But Haddock Thomas was still alive, so what did
loved
mean?

‘Delphi was younger than I was—ten years younger.’ He dismissed Audley with a half-glance. ‘And Haddock was almost exactly eleven years older than I was … I know that, because he used to say that he was conceived after the Battle of Loos and born during the Battle of Somme—and that’s 1916. So I was midway between them. And … it wasn’t just “Yes” and “No”. I thought he was too old for her, as a matter of fact, Miss Loftus.’

Elizabeth struggled with the mathematics of what he was trying to tell her, which somehow added up to the dreadful arithmetic of the whole blood-stained twentieth century: Haddock Thomas had been a pilot in Father’s war—but Sir Peter had been just too young for that … and
Delphi
—
Philadelphia Marsh
—
?

‘He introduced me to her. It was at a party in the American Embassy—Dr Marsh was one of their economic advisers, commuting between Bonn and London and Washington … Haddock had worked with him, off and on, ever since he’d joined the service, after he’d come down from Oxford the second time, after the war.’

‘Where—when did you meet … Haddock?’

‘At Oxford, in ‘48. He was a post-graduate—a Farnsworth scholar. If you want to address him correctly he’s
Doctor
Caradog Thomas. I was a mere undergraduate.’

‘But you were friends.’

‘Not then. I seconded a motion he proposed in a debate. “This house does not believe all cats are grey at night”. After that we were friendly acquaintances. I didn’t meet him again until … ‘53—no, ‘54. He was Foreign Office, I was an economic dogsbody. It was in Paris.’

‘And that was when you became friends? But he was older than you.’

‘Oh yes. Eleven years
and
a war older, Miss Loftus. But he always maintained the war didn’t count—those were his lost years, he said, so they were struck off. And that made the difference only five years.’ He thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I didn’t think of him as being older, anyway. Not then.’

He stopped, and Elizabeth knew she would have to jog him again to make him go on. ‘He introduced you—?’

‘Yes. To Delphi Marsh. He knew a lot of people—a lot of girls. I didn’t.’ He was slowing again. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Yes, Sir Peter. She was his girl?’

‘No. She was no one’s girl when he introduced her.’ He took his memory by the throat suddenly. ‘Then she was my girl—very much my girl, Miss Loftus. We had an understanding. We went on holiday to Italy together. Then she went on holiday again, but without me. And then she was Mrs Caradog Thomas.’ He drew a single breath. ‘And then she was pregnant, and then she was dead, Miss Loftus,’ he expelled the words with the same breath, as though to clear them finally from his chest, once and for all.

‘Dead?’ The sudden ending to an otherwise familiar story took Elizabeth by surprise. ‘She died—?’

‘In childbirth?’

He shook his head. ‘She was knocked down by a car.’

‘A lorry, actually,’ murmured Audley.

‘A lorry, then.’ He continued to look at her as he half-turned his head towards Audley. ‘If you want to know all the details I’m sure he has them on file somewhere. But it was no one’s fault. At least … at least that was what Haddock wrote in his letter.’

Elizabeth frowned from Sir Peter to Audley. It was as though they had assembled a jigsaw for her, carefully sorting the straight edges and the surrounding pieces, but leaving the centre blank. ‘But how did—? You said … he was “shopped”—how was he shopped?’

‘Quite simply, Elizabeth dear. As simply as “B” comes before “T”, to start with. Meaning that I came to “Barrie” on my little list before I came to “Thomas”. Because they’d both been on holiday in foreign parts, but one tends to work alphabetically.’

‘But—‘ Elizabeth came within a tyro’s breath of adding
why
, only just catching herself in time: for whatever original reason, Audley had only been doing then what she was doing now, all those years ago ‘—but Sir Peter had left the service—the Board of Trade, or the Treasury, or whatever—by then, surely?’ It was lame, but it was better than nothing.

‘Very true,’ agreed Sir Peter. ‘But then, even if I had still been employed in Whitehall, it was still a great nonsense.’

Elizabeth looked at him. ‘Why was it a great nonsense?’

‘For three reasons, Miss Loftus. You yourself have supplied the first: I had quit the Queen’s service—I had, as it were, privatized myself. And although the Greek had some fairly hot little secrets of his own, they were hardly the sort which should have interested British Intelligence. Besides which, I was never really privy to any of his secrets, I only suspected things here and there. But the second reason is more to the point, though actually not dissimilar. Because, when I
was
in the service, what I was doing was hardly top secret. It was sensitive, of course—some of it. But none of it was really in the least important. What I had in my head was of far more use to the Greek’s oil deals than to any foreign power, actually. So if they were after a traitor, I was a very poor candidate.’