Our Man in Camelot (23 page)

“Pleased to meet you all, Mrs Fitzgibbon—and no sugar, thank you,” he heard himself drawl in his best Virginian. “I’m sorry to disappoint you… by not being a CIA man, that is.”

“That’s quite all right, Captain. I was only asking a routine question.”

“Routine fiddlesticks,” said Shirley. “And she wanted to know more about Di Davies than about you, honey.”

“And were you able to satisfy her, Mrs Sheldon?” asked Audley.

“Seeing as how I hardly knew the man, the whole thing was a waste of time. He was my husband’s friend, not mine.”

Audley looked towards Mrs Fitzgibbon. “Well, Frances?”

“I agree… Except I’d go further: I very much doubt that Mrs Sheldon ever met Major Davies, beyond perhaps saying ‘good morning’ to him.”

“That’s ridiculous!” snapped Shirley.

“She knows her cover story perfectly,” continued Frances Fitzgibbon. “She is extremely resourceful in blocking questions beyond it. I would think it unlikely that anything she has told me will conflict seriously with what her husband may have told you. Not so far, anyway— But I don’t think the story would stand up to separate in-depth interrogation. Either they didn’t have time to put it together in total detail, or they never expected it to be professionally tested.”

“Or they are amateurs,” said Audley.

Frances Fitzgibbon considered Shirley for a moment. “If she is, she’s a natural.”

Mosby could feel the water-tight bulkheads beneath him giving way one after another. If he was going to save anything from this disaster, never mind Shirley’s skin and his own, it would be from a lifeboat. It was time to abandon the ship.

“Is everyone going crazy?” said Shirley. “I just don’t understand what’s—“

“Shut up, honey,” said Mosby in a flat voice.

“What?” she rounded on him. “Are you going to stand there and—“

“I said ‘shut up’. So shut up.” Mosby stared round him with what he hoped was the air of a defiant trapped rat. His eyes met Hugh Roskill’s over a steaming teacup. “And don’t drink that tea, Squadron Leader—it’ll blow your abscess through your jaw.”

Roskill lowered his cup as hurriedly as if he had smelt bitter almonds in it. “Damnation! I’d clean forgotten.” He grinned at Mosby. “Thanks, Sheldon.”

“Think nothing of it. I guess I’m a better dentist than I am a burglar.” He shrugged at Audley. “I should have stuck to teeth.”

Audley nodded slowly. “You didn’t really know Davies, did you? Not as a friend.”

“Not really. I just fixed his teeth.”

Shirley drew in a sharp breath. “Mose—what are you saying?”

“I’m letting it go, honey. It’s gotten too rich for us—and too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous?”

“David says it’s already killed a bunch of guys.”

“Killed?” Shirley’s voice cracked. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But he’s not kidding. And it wouldn’t be any use to us if he was. Because he already knows where Badon is: it’s under the goddamn runway at Wodden, that’s where it is. Right—under—the—goddamn—runway.”

“Runway extension,” corrected Audley.

“The runway extension.” Mosby loaded the words with bitterness and kept his eyes on Shirley. “Davies must have talked to someone else after all.”

Shirley licked her lips. “It can’t be—you said it was a hill. Badon Hill.”

“But it is a hill,” said Roskill. “The whole of RAF Wodden is high ground: it’s a plateau. And the western spur slopes up to the highest point, where the old windmill used to be—Windmill Knob, they used to call it. They demolished it in 1940, when the RAF moved in, but the foundations were still there in the grass when I was training there twelve years ago.”

But not there any more, thought Mosby with growing dismay. The whole of the western end had been thoroughly levelled, bulldozed and landscaped like a pool table, and the spoil spread far and wide into every undulation of the main ridge.

If Badon had been there—

“And you never suspected it was on the base?” Roskill sounded almost sympathetic. “You didn’t—“

“Let it be, Hugh,” said Audley. “There’s no need to probe the wound now.”

It took every bit of Mosby’s self-restraint not to look at Audley in surprise. This was the exact moment to probe the wound, while it was raw and painful; and ever since the drift of Audley’s new scenario had become clear he had been feverishly constructing his role in it as a greedy little interloper who had planned to cash in on accidental knowledge of the dead pilot’s discovery. Yet now Audley was deliberately passing up his best chance of quizzing him.

“The only thing I would like to know,” said Audley casually, as though it was an afterthought, “is how you acquired the Badon artefacts—just for the record.”

Mosby felt almost relieved at getting one of the key questions after all, no matter how awkward; it reassured him that Audley was still running to form.

“Yeah… well, what I told you wasn’t so far off the real thing…” He shrugged.
If you have to make up a story quickly, keep it simple and don
’
t bother about the loose ends. Let the other guy try and tie them up for you
—
he knows that the truth is untidy
. “He asked me to look after them for him. I got this storeroom behind my surgery—“

“Although he hardly knew you?” cut in Frances Fitzgibbon.

“Not ‘although’, but ‘because’,” said Audley. “Davies chose Mosby
because
he didn’t know him. And because there’s nothing suspicious about visiting a dentist. If there had been we’d have one very dead dentist by now.”

“What do you mean—dead dentist?” Shirley had entirely abandoned her Scarlett O’Hara characterisation for a more classical one: this was Lady Macbeth frightened and beginning to crack under the pressure of unforeseen disasters.

“Exactly what I say, I’m afraid, Mrs Sheldon. The fact is, you’ve both had a very narrow escape. If Davies had really confided in you—or if you had started looking for Badon in the right place, then the odds against your survival would have been very high. But he didn’t, and you didn’t… which is why you are here safe and sound now.”

“But—but we haven’t done anything wrong!” Shirley wailed. “Not really.”

“So your husband keeps telling me. But then neither had Major Davies—really. Nor that young navigator of his—Captain—what was his name?”

“Collier,” said Roskill.

“Collier. He hadn’t done anything at all, poor fellow. He certainly didn’t deserve to be eliminated.”

“That was an accident—they crashed in the sea.”

“And very conveniently, too. You’ve no idea how many convenient deaths have occurred just recently. Deaths and disappearances… Let me have the photographs, Hugh. It’s time for a bit of positive co-operation.”

Roskill snapped open a black briefcase and withdrew a square buff-coloured envelope from it.

“Thank you.” Audley in turn slipped out a collection of photographs of different sizes from the envelope, shuffling them like cards into what was presumably the desired sequence. “Now I want you both to have a look at these… Mosby first, then Mrs Sheldon… and I’d like you to try to identify them. I’m afraid one or two of them aren’t awfully clear, and a couple aren’t very nice to look at, either, but I’ll warn you about them in advance. Just do your best.”

He handed Mosby a photograph.

It was a typical USAF mug-shot of a typical American service face, right down to the stern, Defender of Liberty expression, even if the crew-cut and the uniform hadn’t placed identification beyond doubt. Four days ago he would hardly have been able to tell this one from a hundred others whose jaws he knew better than their features.

“This is Di Davies,” said Mosby.

Audley put his finger to his lips. “Let your wife see them first, if you don’t mind. Pass it on.”

Mosby handed the mug-shot to Shirley.

Another picture. This one for sure he wouldn’t have known until four days ago, mug-shot though it was.

“This one’s Di Davies,” agreed Shirley. “But this other one… I’ve seen him around, but I don’t know his name.”

“Captain Collier,” said Mosby. “He’d only been over here a few weeks.”

“Now a nasty one,” said Audley gently. “Be prepared, Mrs Sheldon.”

A dead face, slack and blankly staring nowhere. Someone had attempted to arrange it into a more or less life-like appearance, but there was obviously something very wrong with the left side of the head.

Shirley shuddered and drew in a quick breath. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“Nor me,” Mosby shook his head.

“I think possibly you have, but maybe not,” said Audley. “His name is—or was—Pennebaker. He was an airman on the base at Wodden. Shot himself a couple of days ago.”

“He shot himself?”

“Well, that’s what we’re required to believe. But our forensic people have their doubts… They think he was helped, you might say. And I’m very much inclined to believe them.” He paused. “Now here’s an interesting one.”

The photograph was bigger, but not nearly so well focussed—a blown-up fragment of a larger unposed snapshot, maybe—

Hell and damnation!

“Ah! I see that one rings a bell,” said Audley happily. “Let your wife have a look, there’s a good chap.”

Shirley stared. “Why, isn’t that Harry what’s-his-name— the Public Relations guy?”

“Finsterwald,” said Mosby. “Is he—dead?”

“Why, I saw him only three-four days back in the BX,” said Shirley. She looked from Mosby to Audley. “Do you mean to say he’s dead too?”

Audley raised a hand. “Just look at the pictures, Mrs Sheldon. We’ll get to the captions in due time.”

Another picture. This time Mosby was ready for anything, but the black face staring over his shoulder was totally new to him.

There followed more black faces, snapped at a variety of angles, and judging from the background detail with a telescopic lens. By the time they reached Calvin Merriwether’s portrayal of sullen emptiness the fact was pretty well established that to Captain and Mrs Mosby Sheldon, of the Commonwealth of Virginia, all coloured men looked alike; which the British could hardly quarrel with, since they obviously had had the same difficulty.

The hopeful sign about all the pictures—and about Harry’s too—was that they were taken from life, unlike the Pennebaker shot. But the deduction from that was that the British were on to the pair of them, even if they hadn’t yet established any connection with their captives.

Audley offered him another picture. “Another nasty one.”

It was of another dead face—not so horrible as that of the airman, but with the same lifeless stare… yet quite unlike anything he had so far been shown: the wrinkled features of old age beneath an untidy halo of white hair—

Oh, God
! Mosby thought with sickening certainty, recalling Merriwether’s admiration. ‘
He
’
s a great old guy
’
.

James Barkham, old-fashioned bookseller.

“I’m sure I never met him,” said Shirley firmly.

Mosby shook his head. “He’s new to me too.”

Audley nodded. “Only two more.”

The permutations of what he had said earlier raced through Mosby’s brain.
Four killed
—they had seen four dead men already.
Maybe seven
—but they had already seen two possibles, and another two would make eight. So it didn’t add up.

He gazed into the face of Tall and Thin. Sickeningly, it bore the same smile as it had done in its last minute of life in St Swithun’s Churchyard a few hours earlier.

“No,” he said.

Shirley looked. “Same here—no.”

And then Thickset, his own victim.

He was calm now. The stakes were altogether too high for panic.

“No. Never seen him before either. Sorry.” He watched Audley as he passed the photo to Shirley. “I guess we’ve not helped very much.”

“I didn’t expect miracles.”

“Were they all—have they all been killed?”

Audley shook his head. “Not all. You’ve seen four dead men—you’ll have worked out which they were, of course. Plus two missing and two killers.”

“Killers?” Mosby set his teeth. “Murderers?”

“The presumption is overwhelming, yes.”

Mosby pointed to the picture in Shirley’s hand. “You mean —that guy and the other one?”

“No. Those are two of our men who haven’t reported in. The killers are your comrade Captain Finsterwald and his coloured associate, whom we haven’t yet identified.”

Mosby gaped at him. “Harry Finsterwald? You can’t be serious!”

“Why not, Captain Sheldon?” asked Frances Fitzgibbon.

Mosby stared at her. “Harry Finsterwald? Hell—he’s in Base Public Relations, not Murder Incorporated. He’s just a dumb son-of-a-bitch with an expensive smile.”

“That’s right.” Shirley nodded. “He maybe fancies himself as a lady-killer—at the Cobra Squadron Fourth of July party I had to fight him off in the parking lot—“

“You never told me that,” said Mosby hotly.

“Honey, I don’t tell you every time someone gets fresh with me. You’d only get your teeth knocked in.”

“Harry Finsterwald—“ Audley broke in “—is not Harry Finsterwald.”

“Huh?” Mosby and Shirley turned towards him simultaneously.

“His name is Harry Feiner,” said Frances Fitzgibbon. “And he’s a veteran CIA operative—Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, all the way down to Singapore. Counter-insurgency expert, Special Operations Unit commander, counter-intelligence strongarm man—you name it, he’s been it. We know him from Singapore, no mistake.”

“Though we didn’t know he was here in Britain until yesterday, apparently,” said Audley, looking at Roskill.

“Well, he’s not on the embassy list, for heaven’s sake,” said Roskill defensively. “And they’ve got nearly ninety on it already, it’s one of the biggest single overseas posts. We just can’t keep track of all the extras they’ve brought in outside London, we just don’t have the manpower—at least, not to watch our own bloody allies.”

“Bloody allies is right,” murmured Frances Fitzgibbon.

“He’s a CIA man?” said Mosby. “Harry Finsterwald?”

“Harry Feiner, Captain.” Frances Fitzgibbon corrected him with the air of a little schoolmarm trying to straighten out a big stupid pupil. “We caught up with him yesterday when we were inquiring into the death of the man who supplied Major Davies with his books, an old man named Barkham.”