Soldier No More (3 page)

Still, that was a good job well done: he had his half-hour now, and a generous half-hour too, all correct and accounted for and accountable, and above all innocent. The rest depended on others, and on their correct observance of the routine.

He sauntered across the forecourt towards the workshop feeling reassured, if not happy. It might all be routine, and the Comrades were always sticklers for routine. Yet the effort involved even in this routine, and the precautions they had taken in communicating with him, made him feel important, and more important than he had felt for years. And if the feeling was a secret one, like the rich man’s pleasure in stolen masterpieces in his hidden gallery, then that was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of it.

The mechanic withdrew his head from the raised bonnet and bobbed encouragingly at him.

“Found the right bracket, sir—just the job!” He plunged his head back quickly, before Roche could question him or God could strike him down for bearing false witness against the British Motor Corporation.

Roche nodded uselessly at his back, and continued his aimless saunter, back on to the forecourt, slowly past the pumps, to the very edge of the highway.

He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn’t given up smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn’t like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was always cautioning him to give up drinking, or almost, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-Paul, only to himself; and although the new Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance … and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he had in mind for himself.

Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a
Daily Sketch
in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.

Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view—maybe art imitating reality imitating art. And it was time to find out.

He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.

Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.

Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.

If he was wrong about the man, it didn’t matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn’t worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche’s naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

Nothing to fear. He had told
them
where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that lunportant to
them
—or even if it wasn’t—they could be relied on to oversee
their
security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to soldier on until they were ready to try again.

He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they didn’t make contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about
Audley, David Longsdon
, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—merely annoying. So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at churches was one of his hobbies.

Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.

The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.

If they were here, then still
nothing to fear
. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was “This is your big chance, David”—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else. And so it was, by God!

“Mr Roche.”

At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the
Daily Sketch
reader outside.

“I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me ‘Johnnie’, Mr Roche—and I shall call you David.”

The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked ‘Johnnie’ into ‘Ivan’; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol horseman riding through the man’s ancestry at about the same time as this church had been built.

“Johnnie,” Roche acknowledged the identification.

“How long do we have?” The voice didn’t fit the face, it was too accent-less, any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who wouldn’t have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.

“About half an hour.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Guildford. I’m due to meet a man named Stocker.”

“Major Stocker?”

“That’s right. You know him?”

“Why?” Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn’t think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.

“He’s going to brief me on this man Audley.”

“He’s your controller—Stocker?”

“No—I don’t know … I’m to report back to Colonel Clinton when—“

“Clinton?” The eyes and the face remained expressionless, but the voice moved. “Frederick Clinton?”

“Yes—?”

“He was there? At your meeting—on the Eighth Floor?”

“Yes. But—“

“And you are to report back to
him
—not Avery? Or Latimer?” Genghis Khan pressed the question at him like a spear. “Clinton?”

“Yes.” It was disturbing to see his own fears reflected in Genghis Khan’s evident concern. “Is that bad?”

“You… are to report back to…
Clinton
…
about this man Audley?”

Audley, David Longsdon. Born, St. Elizabeth’s Nursing Home, Guildford, 10.2.25. Only son of Major Nigel Alexander George Audley (deceased), and Kathleen Ann, nee Longsdon (deceased), of The Old House, Steeple Horley, Sussex…

He didn’t even bloody well seem interested in
Audley, David Longsdon
, damn it!

“Yes. What about Clinton?”

“This man Audley, then—“ Genghis Khan ignored the question again, as though it hadn’t been asked. But it was no good thinking of him as
Genghis Khan
, and letting him ride all over
David Roche
as though over a helpless Muscovite peasant: he had to be
Johnnie
, and he had to be resisted.

“What about Clinton?”

The pebble-eyes bored into him. “He frightened you, did he?”

“If he did?”

“He should. He’s good, is Clinton.”

“He frightens
you
, does he?”

“No. But he does interest me.” The Slav features failed to register the insult. “He is an interesting man, I think.”

“He interests me even more. Because I have to report back to him, and you don’t.”

Genghis Khan, refusing to be Johnnie, inclined his head fractionally to accept the truth of that. “Maybe later. But not yet—not now. You tell me about Audley now, David.”

That was probably as much as he could expect to get about Clinton, decided Roche, since Clinton was evidently a wild card in the pack. But Audley was another matter.

“I thought you would be able to tell me about him.”

Genghis Khan almost looked disappointed, as near as he was able to indicate any emotion.

“I gave you his name,” said Roche.

“So you did. But what do you expect us to do—to go asking questions?” The head moved again, this time interrogatively. “And we ask the wrong question in the right place—or the right question in the wrong place, which is no better—and then what? Someone asks questions about us—and then someone asks questions about you, maybe? And is that what you want, eh?”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean … you must have something on him, damn it!”

“On Audley? But why should we have anything on Audley?”

Roche frowned. “But Sir Eustace said—“

Sir Eustace said
—

“How long have you been in Paris then, David?” Sir Eustace Avery asked.

“Nearly three years, Sir Eustace. Two years and ten months, to be exact.”

“To be exact? You sound as though you’ve been marking the calendar.” Sir Eustace sat back, raising a cathedral spire with his fingers. “Don’t you like it there?”

“It’s … a lovely city.” Roche decided to push his luck. “And the food’s good.”

Sir Eustace regarded him narrowly. “But the work’s dull—is that it?”

Chin up, Roche. “Mine certainly is.” Dull, dull, dull!

“Even though liaison is an integral part of intelligence work?” The finger-tips at the point of the spire arched against each other. “And you’re in charge of communications too—“ Sir Eustace looked down at the open file in front of him “—and communications are your special skill, aren’t they?”

My file
, thought Roche despondently: aptitudes, test marks, assessments, with more bloody betas and gammas than alphas.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the Eighth Floor didn’t muck around with communications—or with communications experts.

“I mean, we got you from the Royal Signals, didn’t we?” Sir Eustace continued, looking up at him again. “In Tokyo, wasn’t it? During the Korean business?”

Since it was all down there in front of him, in black and white, the questions were superfluous to the point of being both irritating and patronising.

“I put down for the Education Corps, sir,” said Roche. “I was posted to the Signals.”

“Indeed?” Sir Eustace raised an eyebrow over the file. “Let’s see … you’d already been to university … Manchester?” He made it sound like Fort Zinderneuf. “Where you read History—that was before you were called up for your National Service?”

“French history mostly, actually.”

“French history?”

“It’s a well-established qualification to the Royal Corps of Signals,” said Roche, straight-faced.

“It is?” Sir Eustace gave him an old-fashioned look. “But you volunteered for the RAEC nevertheless—did you want to be a schoolmaster, then?”

“No, Sir Eustace.” Roche cast around for a respectable reason for joining the RAEC while not intending to go into teaching after demobilisation. He certainly hadn’t wanted to be a teacher
then
—that had been Julie’s idea later.
Then
… he hadn’t particularly wanted to be anything; and a degree in History, and more particularly a knowledge of French history, had equipped him with no useful qualification except for transmitting that otherwise useless interest to the next generation. And so on
ad infinitum
, from generation to generation—that bleak conclusion, as much as anything else, had turned him against teaching. The conviction that the later French kings had been not so much effete as unfortunate had somehow not seemed to him of great importance in the creation of a more egalitarian Britain, not to mention a better world.

“Why, then?” persisted Sir Eustace.

He met Sir Eustace’s gaze and, to his surprise, truth beckoned him once more. And not just truth, but also a sudden deeper instinct: these were the top brass, not the middlemen he was accustomed to report to—their rank and demeanour said as much, Thain’s obsequious departure said as much, and Admiral Hall’s portrait confirmed the message. They hadn’t summoned him here simply to give him his orders, they had other people to do that. He was here because they wanted to look at him for themselves, to see the whites of his eyes and—more likely—the yellow of his soul.

It was his chance, and he had to take it. And he wouldn’t get it by answering ‘Yes, Sir Eustace’ and ‘No, Sir Eustace’ like the scared, timeserving nonentity he was.

“I thought, if I fluffed the selection board, or I didn’t stay the course as an officer-cadet at Eaton Hall, then at least I’d end up as an Education Corps sergeant in a cushy billet somewhere,” he said coolly.

“You like cushy billets?” Sir Eustace pounced on the admission. “Isn’t Paris a cushy billet?”

“Yes, it is—“

“I don’t know a cushier billet than Paris!” Sir Eustace looked around him for agreement.