‘Indeed?’ Jaggard’s politeness was strained to breaking-point, like the window of the de Havilland Comet which Garrod Harvey’s own godfather had trawled up from the sea-bottom off Elba thirty years before. ‘So what?’
‘The most recent one was on Kipling’s children’s stories.’ Harvey gauged the moment when Jaggard would explode, as the Comet window had exploded. ‘You know, my wife tells me that “We are what we eat”. But it seems to me that, more accurately, “We are what we read”. Or … in the present generation what we don’t read—I suppose it’s what we see now, on the television. Which is a truly dreadful prospect—’
‘Garry—’ Jaggard controlled himself with difficulty. ‘I have to see the Minister’s Special Adviser in about two minutes. And I don’t think I’m in a position to stretch his patience—do you?’
It was time to lower the pressure. ‘I think we might have something to offer the Minister. At least … if he’s prepared to cover our flanks, if anything truly unpleasant occurs.’ Garrod Harvey couldn’t bring himself to recall ‘the good of the state’ as an ally, even though it had to be their only true good, for what he envisaged; because the Minister’s Special Adviser would only be concerned with the good of his Minister. ‘Because Audley’s most recent article was on Kipling’s children’s stories, as I was saying—’
It was to Jaggard’s credit that he merely opened his mouth and then closed it without exploding, like some of the Comets which had managed more flights than others.
‘There’s this passage he quotes—’ Harvey held Jaggard’s attention ‘—which just about sums up the way he operates, on the rare occasions when he goes out into the field. Because when it’s all over he always says “I didn’t do anything—it just happened that way. It wasn’t my fault.” It’s called “shibbuwichee”, apparently.’
‘It’s called what—?’
‘ “Shibbuwichee”. Which Kipling thought was a form of Japanese wrestling.’ Nod. ‘My elder boy was given a complete set of Kipling by his godfather last year, so I’ve been able to look it up: “These wrestler-chaps have got some sort of trick that lets the other chap do all the work. Then they give a little wriggle, and he upsets himself. It’s called ’shibbuwichee‘, or ’tokonoma‘, or something”.’ He blessed old Hetherington again, and his own memory too. ‘And that’s how Audley operates. So what I thought was that we might do the same to him now, Henry.’
‘How?’ Jaggard was there, ahead of him.
‘If we tell him Panin wants to see him, he won’t be able to resist that—’
‘But if he does?’
‘We’ll make it irresistible. Leave that to me.’ Part of their usual accord was that there were some things which Jaggard didn’t need to know. ‘But I don’t think he’ll want to miss Panin for a return game. And that could solve our Polish problem without the need to risk Viking. Because he’s never going to let Panin outsmart him. So you can be sure that whatever Panin really wants, Audley will find out what it is. And he won’t let Panin get away with it.’
‘But … if it goes the other way—?’
‘Then there’ll be a scandal.’ Garrod Harvey shrugged. ‘But if we leave Zarubin and Panin to their own devices there’ll be a scandal anyway, most likely, Henry. But this way … this way it’ll be a Research and Development scandal. Because Audley will never come to us for help—it’s not in his nature to come to anyone, not even Jack Butler if he can avoid it. And certainly not when someone like Panin is involved. He’ll want to shibbuwich the man, like last time, Henry. David Audley’s whole psychology is dedicated to winning, not to Queensberry Rules games-playing. But if loses this time … then you can blow R & D wide open, Henry.’
‘Yes.’ That enticing possibility plainly captivated Jaggard—as it had from the start. ‘But if he loses, Garry —Panin’s a murderous swine … and Zarubin—’ He fixed Harvey coldly ‘—Zarubin’s worse than Panin, in so far as that’s possible, Garry.’
That was the good Catholic speaking, echoing generations of good Catholic Jaggards from the Reformation onwards, who had sweated and suffered for their Faith then, and had been disadvantaged even in liberal England for the next three hundred years afterwards, down to the living memory of Henry Jaggard’s own great-grandfather. ‘So?’
‘I can’t risk Audley.’ The cold look became deep-frozen. ‘Bringing R & D to heel is important. But what they’re doing at the moment is important also. And Audley’s done a lot of good work, over a lot of years, Garry. So risking him now just isn’t on.’
‘I agree—I do agree, absolutely!’ Harvey understood the complexity of his error and Henry Jaggard’s dilemma simultaneously: the professional and patriotic ninety-nine-hundredths of Henry Jaggard wanted what they both wanted; but the hundredth part of Henry Jaggard was old Catholic and very different—what it wanted, that hundredth part, was either Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin on his raw knees in front of the High Altar, praying for the forgiveness which the Holy Catholic Church never denied sinners … or Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin broken and bloody, and turned over to the Civil Power for appropriate final punishment, like in the old days.
‘I do agree, Henry.’ Garrod Harvey kept his face straight. Because what Henry Jaggard wanted was for Audley to win and lose at the same time; and that was exactly what he was now about to offer to Henry Jaggard, and the Minister’s Special Adviser, and the Minister, and the Prime Minister, and Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II! ‘But my money’s on David Audley—I think he’ll screw Panin into the ground, and General Zarubin with him. But I also think we have to give him a bodyguard, to watch over him—’
‘A bodyguard—’
‘That’s right: a bodyguard.’ Nod. ‘I’ve taken that for granted.’ Another nod, for good measure. ‘Not just to look after him, but also to keep us informed as to how he’s breaking all the rules in the book. Because that’s what he always does—he doesn’t even pay lip-service to the rules, Henry. So if he screws Zarubin—Zarubin and Panin … then, even then with a bit of luck, we can still make a scandal of it—if we have someone on the inside beside him, watching him—?’
Jaggard frowned, as though some long-outdated moral scruples were attempting to skirmish with pragmatic experience, like bows-and-arrows against machine-guns, which was no fair contest.
And yet (as though the longbowmen and crossbowmen were cheating, by capitalizing on the silence of their weapons), Jaggard was still frowning at him.
‘We have to have someone alongside him, Henry.’ He had to press home his technological advantage. ‘Otherwise he’ll weasel out of it somehow, like he always has before.’
‘He’ll never accept anyone.’ Jaggard left his moral scruple behind. ‘Or he’ll want someone he can trust, like Mitchell or Andrew from R & D, Garry.’
Garrod Harvey shook his head. ‘They’re all too busy, with their own Gorbachev work. And they don’t fancy minding Audley, at the best of times.’ He made a face at Jaggard. ‘Minding David Audley is a thankless task. And in the past it’s also been rather dangerous. But, in any case, R & D hasn’t got the manpower for it. Or the womanpower.’ This time Henry Jaggard knew better, and merely waited for enlightenment.
Garrod Harvey turned the shake into a nod. ‘I fed a few notional facts into the computer this morning—profile facts.’
Henry Jaggard looked at him, trying to pretend that he knew ‘notional facts’ and ’profile facts’ from the double yellow lines on the road outside, far below them in Whitehall. ‘And—?’
‘I think we’ve got just the man for the job. At least … he’s a medievalist, of a sort. And he also speaks fluent Polish.’ Garrod Harvey smiled invitingly.
Henry Jaggard was so relieved to have left the computer behind that he accepted the invitation. ‘And—?’
They had passed the point where Jaggard might have said ‘What you’re proposing is monstrous, Garry,’ even though what he was now proposing was just that. ‘He isn’t Audley’s son, Henry. But he could have been. Aud
ley will never be able to resist showing off in front of him.’
PART TWO
THE MAN FOR THE JOB
1
TOM MOISTENED the end of his stub of indelible pencil and wrote ‘1025’ beside the line of the bailey ditch on his sketch-map.
If Willy’s measurement of the motte ditch was about 500 feet in circumference, then the whole motte-and-bailey was a dead ringer for the Topcliffe castle in size, if not in date—obviously not in date, because Topcliffe was an early post-Conquest castle, and this was as yet not anything at all except an anonymous ‘earthwork’ on the ordnance survey map. So it just could be Ranulf of Caen’s adulterine castle, which certainly should be somewhere hereabouts if his calculations were right.
On the other hand, it was certainly not much of a motte, he thought doubtfully, looking up into the impenetrable undergrowth above him and trying to estimate the height of the mound. These were undoubtedly Ranulf’s lands, de facto, if the local bishop’s de jure, in the mid-twelfth century; and both Ranulf and the bishop had changed sides in the civil war, several times and not always at the same time. But the Norman barons—even a two-timing (or ten-timing) jumped-up shyster and petty hedgerow mercenary knight like Ranulf—had thrown up more impressive earthworks than this in a hundred other places, with little time and their enemies at their backs. So it still could be merely a fortified manor, a hundred years or more away from Ranulf’s brief medieval gangster flowering during the years of anarchy. So, allowing for the wear-and-tear and the wind-and-rain of all the 800 years afterwards, it all depended on Willy’s measurement, which should establish the circumference and diameter of his hypothetical motte, with its stockade and tower, which could perhaps be proved during his next leave—
The sound came from behind him—above and behind him, in the undergrowth which hemmed in the edge of the bailey ditch, at its junction with the motte ditch (if this really was a genuine motte-and-bailey earthwork castle, he thought pedantically)—and he accepted that it had to be Willy, because the motte ditch was all thorn-bushes and brambles, even worse than the tangle above him, from which Ranulf might once have defied the might of King Stephen (or maybe the Empress Matilda, according to which side he’d been on at the time) —
So he would have to apologize to Willy (Willy would never give him the benefit of the doubt, after that last unfortunate slip on the edge of the moat at Sulhampstead, which had not really been his fault—but poor old Willy)—
But it wasn’t Willy: it was—he dropped his pencil as he stuffed the sketch-map into the back-pocket of his jeans, and automatically reached down to find it, but then stopped just as automatically in mid-fumble, half in nothing more than surprise, but then half in momentarily irrational fear, at the glimpse of a uniform.
Then the fear was subsumed by self-contemptuous irritation with himself, for letting the sight of an ordinary British policeman frighten him—not a Mister-Plod-PC-49 fatherly copper in the dear old high helmet admittedly, with red face and button nose and bicycle-clipped trousers, but a young copper in a flat cap, and no older than himself; yet a young copper who seemed just as surprised at the sight of him, and who was even now more concerned with extricating himself from the trailing bramble-sucker from last year’s blackberry growth which had snagged his uniform.
The trouble is, he justified to himself quickly, I have met too many other sorts of policemen, of the shoot-first and who-cares? variety, these last two years, and that’s a fact! But the conditioned reflex was still nonetheless strong enough to make him pick up the stub of pencil slowly, and to hold it up between thumb and forefinger for inspection, complete with an ingratiating smile, as he straightened up in slow motion to match the gesture, as if to say: ‘Don’t shoot, officer! This is just me—Tom Arkenshaw … And this is just my stub of pencil—not a grenade or a pistol!
But the young policeman only stamped down on the ensnaring blackberry thorns, innocently oblivious of his gestures of submission; which gave him time to come fully to his British senses, to wonder aggressively what’s a bloody copper doing here, sneaking up on me on the edge of old Ranulf’s ditch?
One final trample. And then the young policeman sucked his finger, where a thorn had caught it, before looking down at him again. But it was a damned hostile, suspicious look all the same, thought Tom.
‘What are you after, down here?’ The policeman frowned at his finger again, and then gave it another suck.
Tom’s hackles rose. This was old Ranulf’s ditch, or near enough—not somewhere beyond the Green Line in Beirut, or a poxy Third World slum within mortar-range of a British consulate. But then he thought maybe I’m trespassing—? But there were no peasants in these coverts, so far south of Watford Gap, surely?
‘What—?’ Caution inclined him towards a show of ignorance, to probe the question further, before he pulled rank and privilege. But then a crunching-and-crashing sound, emanating from the floor of the ditch, away to his right, diverted the policeman’s attention.
Other sounds accompanied the crunching-and-crashing, which Tom could guess at, but which he didn’t want to interpret as he bent down to look for their source and prepare for the emergence of their author.
‘What’s that, down there?’ The policeman assumed—assumed all too correctly—that whatever Tom was ‘after’ was related to the sounds.
Tom peered uneasily into the tangle. At the very lowest point of the ditch, which was probably all of six feet higher with in-fill than when Ranulf had forced the local peasantry to dig it, there was something like a tunnel. But, although it might be sufficient for the local fauna—foxes for sure … and maybe even badgers, if there were still badgers unpersecuted here—it was hardly enough for Willy, surely—? Because, for one thing, it was muddy—
‘Have you seen a gentleman hereabouts?’ inquired the policeman, obviously despairing of any other answer, and not expecting it to issue from the bottom of the ditch, anyway.
It was Willy: Tom’s ear, attuned to the worst, caught a word—two words, more precisely—from the other sounds which marked Willy’s passage, exactly according to his orders, with two-yard measuring pole in hand.
Tom turned towards the policeman. Perhaps it was just as well that he had a policeman in attendance, he decided. So the important thing now was to keep the man in attendance, to protect him from physical assault.
The crashing became louder, and the words—good old Anglo-Saxon words, echoing the sentiments of the original ditch-diggers—became clearer.
‘Eh?’ He encouraged the policeman to repeat the question.
‘Have-you-seen—’ The policeman took him in with a despairing glance ‘—a-gentleman—a-gentleman—round-here?’
‘No,’ said Tom truthfully. ‘Why?’
The direct question, following the direct answer, was just the right one for the situation, Tom decided. Because it detained the policeman for another moment; and, if Willy didn’t arrive in a moment after that, he could always try the next question—a good late Medieval question, which had been John Ball’s question—
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
‘You haven’t seen anyone?’ Now the poor devil was caught between the suspicion that he had an awkward customer on his hands and the final arresting vision of Willy’s emergence backwards from the thorn-and-blackberry tangle; and the adjective was strictly accurate rather than Freudian, because Willy’s designer-jeans-encased backside was without doubt a vision sufficient to divert any man from his proper duty, thought Tom.
‘Only her,’ he answered again truthfully, but this time more doubtfully, as he observed the condition of the jeans.
‘Seventy-six—’ She still held the measuring pole in her hand as she broke free from the tunnel ‘—seventy-seven—’
But that wasn’t the whole circumference of the castle mound, thought Tom quickly. He had taken the longer line of the bailey ditch in all innocence, not knowing about the tangle on the far side of the mound wh
ich she must have had to fight her way through, which had left him time to measure that part of the mound’s circumference which fitted into the bailey. So that meant 77 plus 25, multiplied by six. Which meant that Ranulf’s castle was slightly bigger than Topcliffe, but not significantly so; which might mean that Ranulf had been building under the pressure of hot civil war, where William’s man in Yorkshire eighty years earlier would have been throwing up his defences against the sullen pressure of a largely unconquered but disorganized and leaderless Anglo-Saxon population. So that evened things up. But … but, at the same time, it firmed up his theory that this couldn’t actually be Ranulf’s headquarters in Sussex. Or … if it was his HQ, then that might mean—
‘You bastard!’ exclaimed Willy, sitting on her heels in the mud. ‘Look what you’ve done to me!’ She surveyed herself. ‘Christ!’
The designer-jeans were certainly not what they had been before he had sent her out to measure the castle ditch. And her hair had come down at the back—and at the front, too.
‘Christ!’ She let go of the measuring pole with one hand, in order to examine the other hand. ‘I’m goddam hurt!’
That would be the dead blackberry suckers from last year—or maybe the thorn-bushes in the tunnel. It was much too early in the year for stinging nettles, certainly. Because there had been no stinging nettles at Sulhampstead last week, nor within the old Roman walls at Pevensey, the week before.
Willy was busy sucking her finger—
Stinging nettles were interesting, thought Tom. They were always to be found in association with agricultural activity, rather than military or monastic work—was that true or false? There had been sheep at Sulhampstead, and cows at Pevensey. Or had it been the other way round? But, either way, there might be room for some intriguing research there—
For the Good of the State Page 2
