Soldier No More (8 page)

And he hadn’t told everything, either: because in one particular respect, and the most important one, he had already indicated that the paragon wasn’t a paragon.

But that could wait for the right moment.

“How did you come to meet him in the first place?”

Willis looked at him questioningly. “I taught him—when he was at St. George’s, Buckland—but you know that—“

“I meant the father.” Was that a simple misunderstanding, or was it deliberate?

“Oh, I’m sorry—I thought we were back with David … I knew the family. And I got to know Nigel pretty well at Oxford, of course. I was at Univ—University College—he was at Balliol—Eton and Balliol, like
his
father—“ Willis caught himself “—but you hardly want to know about that.”

“I think I want everything you can tell me.”

Willis shrugged. “Oh … he was killed in ‘17, on the Scarpe, commanding our old territorial battalion—the Prince Regent’s Own. And Nigel was killed in ‘40, in the same battalion, not far away… that’s all—history more or less repeating itself, don’t you know.”

So David Audley must have felt a bit queasy, landing in Normandy in ‘44; or certainly after the break-out had commenced, which might have taken him back over the same ill-omened ground. With such a family tradition survival did indeed have great virtue.

“Why didn’t David join his father’s unit?” The question was hardly important, but there was something niggling in the back of Roche’s mind.

“He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to—it didn’t exist any more. After it was massacred in ‘40 it was never reconstituted. The nearest equivalent was the West Sussexes—that’s where they put me afterwards … But I suppose the armoured corps was more fashionable than the poor bloody infantry—blitzkrieg and Rommel and all that—more likely to take a young man’s fancy.” Another shrug. “I don’t know—what made you join whatever you joined, David?”

That was no joke—or no joke meriting the truth, anyway. “I was too young to know any better.”

Willis nodded understandingly. “Well, there’s your answer. And just as well, too, because war’s a young man’s sport, and it relies on a high degree of stupidity—like volunteering for air crew. He was prime cannon-fodder, young David—he didn’t know any better … Whereas Nigel and I—we were almost too old, we were a different sort of fool altogether: a ‘no fool like an old fool’ variety, trapped by foolish patriotism in the 1930s.” The corner of Willis’s lip drooped. “But there we were in ‘39 and ‘40—in the front line, and far too old to be there. And after that, the ones who survived—like me—we were the veterans, we were.” He grinned at Roche.

“I even commanded a battalion for one brief, utterly unmemorable spell in ‘45—not for long, because they’re not
that
stupid, the brass-hats—not for long … but I remember in ‘42 and ‘43, some of my young fellows were quite apologetic about my being there—and even more in ‘44, as though I’d arrived on the battlefield by some ghastly administrative accident.”

How old was he, then? With a little bouncy fellow like this—plenty of healthy sport divided by a substantial intake of alcohol at the local pub made it hard to judge, and the Audley file had had nothing to say on his legal guardian’s
curriculum vitae
.

“Yes … but, of course, the truth was, we
were
too old—and Nigel was even older than I was when he copped it—far too old for playing dangerous games like that! Fair enough if you’re on the jolly old touchline, urging the team on and shouting instructions—‘tackle him low, you stupid boy’. But to be actually on the field, getting wet and cold and muddy—and not only that, to have people shoot real bullets at you into the bargain—that’s really monstrously unpleasant, you know.”

Roche cursed his inability to stem the flow, aware at the same time that there was something the schoolmaster had said that he wanted to pull him back to—what had it been, though?

“He must have married very young—Nigel Audley?” he cut in quickly, as Willis opened his mouth to expatiate further on the horrors of war.

“Eh?” Willis stared at him vaguely for a moment, as though he found it difficult to withdraw from his memories. “Oh, I suppose so. Does it matter?”

“David Audley must have been a honeymoon baby, practically.”

Must he?” The vague look was tinged with irritation. “I can’t say I’ve ever bothered to work it out, you know.” Willis shrugged dismissively. “But I hardly see what that’s got to do with you. Or me.”

“What was she like? The mother?”

“She died when he was a baby.”

“Yes, I know. But what was she like?” Roche didn’t know why he was pressing the question, only that it was there in his mind.

“Oh … she was … very young.” Willis fished in his pocket again, for his pipe.

“Yes?”

Willis jammed the pipe between his teeth. “Yes what?”

What was she like?” repeated Roche obstinately.

Willis removed the pipe and commenced filling it from an ancient leather pouch. “What was she like?”

Yes,” said Roche.

“What … was she like?” Now it was the lighter’s turn.
Puff
. “Didn’t really know her that well.”
Puff, puff
. The wind scattered the smoke. “Nice enough girl.”
Puff, puff, puff
. “So I believe.”

“They met at Oxford, did they?”

“Mmm—think so.” Willis took the pipe from his mouth suddenly and pointed the stem at Roche. “What’s all this in aid of, David Roche?”

Roche met the question innocently. “Didn’t Colonel Clinton make that clear in his letter, Major?”

“Not
Major
—
Wimpy
. You keep forgetting, don’t you!” The schoolmaster’s voice was mildly chiding on the surface, but Roche sensed the anger swimming beneath.

“Sorry!” he apologised quickly. This wasn’t the moment to antagonise the schoolmaster—and, for a guess, that was a warning signal his pupils wouldn’t have missed, too.

“All right, then …” Willis—
Wimpy
—accepted the amends with a nod. “Your lord and master made it very clear, even abundantly clear, one might say, that Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, requires the services of her father’s former right trusty and well-beloved lieutenant of dragoons, my erstwhile pupil … yes, he did make
that
very clear, I grant you … and quickly too, she wants him. And that has a familiar ring about it also, I must say—meaning that owing to the vast stupidity and incompetence of some others among her right trusty and well-beloved servants she has her royal knickers in a twist.”

Well, that was one way of putting it. And it was quite characteristically Willis’s—Wimpy’s, damn it!—way, lacking only a Latin tag.

“But what he did
not
make clear—“ Wimpy cocked a sudden sharp eye at Roche “—always supposing it’s not mere vulgar curiosity on your part, David Roche … is the reason for all this inquiry into
my
David’s remote antecedents. You must have his family history to hand, with his military record—and no doubt you’ve got more than that … So why the rest, eh?”

Obviously Clinton’s letter had not spelt out the past in detail, but that left Roche in a quandary as to how far he ought to go to rectify the omission.

“And please don’t tell me that you’re just obeying orders,” continued Wimpy, still watching him closely. “It wasn’t good enough for our late enemies in ‘45, so it isn’t good enough for you now.”

And yet in a way that was the answer, thought Roche. He was here asking these questions of this man because he had been directed to do so, not for any reason of his own.

“Come on. Or I shall begin to suspect you’re busy putting lies together for me,”said Wimpy silkily. “And I might find that… discouraging.”

There was no more time. “It isn’t that. I’m not sure how far I can trust you, that’s all.” Damn it! It was gone now.

Wimpy smiled again, a winner’s smile. “I don’t think you’ve a lot of choice—do you? As the Good Book says, you just have to cast your bread on the waters.”

“All right.” It was time to cut his losses. “You could say ‘the child is father of the man’, for a start.”

“
You
could say it.” Wimpy’s face closed up. “
I
would say … that a child has many fathers.” He paused for a moment, then gestured towards the rugger pitch. “There’s one father, if you like. Certainly one of David Audley’s fathers, I’d say.”

Roche looked at him questioningly.

“Yes …” Wimpy nodded. “ ‘Audley spent a cold and quiet afternoon at full-back’—I believe that was his first appearance in print at his prep school, in the school mag at St. George’s, the first time he played for the school, in the under-twelves.”

“And you taught him rugger there?”

“I had a hand in his education. But at St. George’s the essence was not so much the games master as the headmaster, to whom certain forms of play in rugby football were a form of Christianity, or otherwise ethical behaviour— it was unchristian to tackle high … not because it was dangerous, but because it was ineffective … running straight was the same—you were in trouble with the Head if you didn’t tackle low, or run straight, or fall on the ball when the other forwards were advancing, or do these various things, because that was the moral, decent, ethical thing to do.”

“You taught David Audley at St. George’s and here at Immingham?”

Roche rallied.

“So I did. David Audley came up from his prep school with a scholarship … in the same year, the same term. We were new boys together, yes.” He grinned at Roche, as though the memory had mellowed him.

“Okay, then.” Roche grinned back. “But what I’m going to tell you is classified. I wouldn’t want my boss to hear about it.”

Wimpy acknowledged the confidence with a single nod. “Understood. And I wouldn’t want
you
to think that anything I may say to you as a result is because Fred Clinton has twisted my arm—far from it! Whatever I tell you now is for my young David’s sake. Because it’s time he did a proper job of work—time he matched his racket to balls worthy of him … time he did something
difficult
, instead of wasting himself on mere scholarship—which is for him quite ridiculous … And all of which, of course, the egregious Clinton is relying on—with me as well as David. And that’s the whole difference between us, between the goats and the poor bloody sheep: we both know how people tick, but he knows how to make them jump as well. So … what is this that’s so frightfully classified, then?”

The man was no fool. Through all the verbiage and side-tracking he held to his primary objectives, one after another.

Roche watched him narrowly. “You know David Audley worked for intelligence at the end of the war?”

“For Clinton?”

“Or someone like him—yes.”

Wimpy nodded. “I didn’t know. But it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Not one bit.”

No fool, and perhaps more than that, thought Roche, observing the little schoolmaster’s deadpan reaction. Viewed from the spectators’ stand, the connection between Clinton and the once-upon-a-time Major Willis had seemed a remarkable slice of luck in the process of gathering information about David Audley. But from the players’ point of view such happy coincidences could never be accepted on their face value until every suspicious element of cause-and-effect had been eliminated.

“Yes?” inquired Wimpy innocently.

Too innocently. Because all a player had to do to eliminate this coincidence was to rearrange the facts to make better sense of them.

“He mustered out when he went up to Cambridge in ‘46, I take it?” urged Wimpy, offering his intelligent guess as any innocent seeker-after-knowledge might have done.

Much too innocent. Because, in spite of his repeated allusions to the purely regimental nature of his military service as a ‘poor bloody infantryman’ , Wimpy had known Clinton well long before David Audley had put on his dragoon’s uniform; and Clinton had never been a ‘poor bloody infantryman’ in his life—he had been Genghis Khan’s ‘professional from way back’, a career intelligence officer.

“That’s right—“

Yes, and doubly right: if this little schoolmaster hadn’t been a full-time intelligence player, he had done his time on the substitutes’ bench, in Clinton’s team. And that answered that nagging little question, hitherto unanswered:
how did a callow dragoon subaltern, however bright, get pulled out of the battle into intelligence work at the age of nineteen or twenty
?

“—it seems he caused a certain amount of… hassle in the work he was doing, as a matter of fact, actually …” Roche trailed off deliberately, passing the ball back to Wimpy.

The schoolmaster smiled. “He made waves? Yes … that doesn’t surprise me either. When he was young he was … he appeared to be, I should say … malleable—biddable, you might say. But there was always a well-concealed streak of obstinacy in him—it was as though he seemed to be doing what you wanted, but in the end it turned out to be what
he
wanted, don’t you know!” He shook his head, still smiling. “When he grew up, as he got older, the streak became more obvious. But back in ‘44 he was worth saving, and he still is, by God!”

The last piece of the Clinton-Willis connection slotted into place with jig-saw accuracy. That smile was made of more than pride in a bright pupil and affection for a dead brother-officer’s only son: for a guess it had been Wimpy himself who had recommended Audley to Clinton back in 1944, to get him out of the front line.

“Bloody awkward, is the way I’ve heard it.” He smiled back at Wimpy.

Wimpy managed to adjust his smile at last to something more properly neutral. “But they like him now, enough to want him back, nevertheless?”

“I don’t think they ever stopped liking him, actually.” A little soft soap wouldn’t go amiss, especially when there had to be an element of truth in it, whatever Latimer might maintain.

“They … meaning you?” inquired Wimpy politely.

Roche shook his head. “They meaning they.” It would do no harm to differentiate the decent Roche, just doing his duty, from the foxy Clinton. And there was a bit of truth in that too, anyway. “They parted when he went up to Cambridge in ‘46, when he was demobbed. But they tried to re-enlist him again after he graduated, you see—before my time—“