October Men

by Anthony Price

  So they’d leaned on this poor old countrywoman without a penny in her purse, and if she’d summoned up the Archangel Gabriel and all the hosts of Heaven she couldn’t have frightened ‘em more with the name she’d given ‘em back.

  “Clarkie—how on earth do you come to know Sir Laurie Deacon?” He couldn’t keep the admiration out of his voice and he didn’t try to. “You really do know him?”

  “I do, sir. But I’m not saying more than that.”

  Richardson stared at her for a moment, then rose from his chair and began carefully and ostentatiously to examine the room. First the flower vases, then under the table and chairs, behind the ornaments, in the fireplace. When Mrs. Clark stared at him in surprise he put a finger to his lips and continued the search wordlessly until he was satisfied that there was nothing to be found. Then he listened silently at the door, bending even to peer through the keyhole, and as a final obvious precaution craned his neck quickly through the open window.

  “I think we’re clear,” he murmured conspiratorially, pulling up one of the chairs from under the table until it was directly opposite where she was sitting.

  “Clarkie, you’re bloody marvellous… Now, you don’t need to say anything if you don’t want to. You’ve got ‘em all beaten anyway, I tell you—but I just want you to listen to what I’ve got to say, and listen carefully.”

  She watched him intently.

  “You’re worried about Charlie, aren’t you? About what it’d do to him—all the police and the newspapermen and so on, never mind what might be said in court. I know that and I understand it.”

  Mrs. Clark’s lower lip trembled and Richardson reached out and patted her knee.

  “Well, don’t you worry about that, Clarkie. I can fix that—I give you my word I can fix that, even without calling up Sir Laurie Deacon. He’s your second line—I’m your front line. Because I can fix it so Charlie never has to go to court. If you’ll trust me—and if you’ll both promise never to talk about what happened last night—then they’re willing to tell everyone it was an accident. Charlie needn’t come into it at all. You just heard the shot and went and called Constable— what’s his name—Yates.”

  She was frowning at him now, but frowning in evident disbelief. But why should she disbelieve him?

  “Don’t you believe me, Clarkie?”

  That frown had deepened at the mention of Yates, the Constable— the village copper. Richardson tried to project himself into her mind to pinpoint the line in it where trust ended and distrust began.

  The village copper … could it be as simple as that? Could it be that in a world of fallen idols she still believed that some still stood, neither to be bribed nor bullied? That the law really was the law, though the heavens fell?

  Or was it even more simply that his word was not enough and she needed to know why he was able to make a mockery of law and truth so easily?

  “I’ll tell you why you’ve got to believe me, Clarkie. You see this— business—is a lot more complicated than it seems. It doesn’t involve just you and Charlie. It involves Dr. Audley.”

  “I don’t see as how it can do that, sir.”

  So David and Charlie ranked equally, each to be protected from outrage, the need to speak up for the one cancelling the need to keep silent for the other.

  “Because he isn’t here?” The wrong word now would spoil everything.

  She nodded cautiously. She was still with him.

  “That’s just it, Clarkie. He really ought to be here.” This, he judged, had to be the moment: the risk had to be taken now whether he liked it or not. “You know that some of the work Dr. Audley does is very important—“ if she didn’t know it she would be pleased nevertheless at the importance of her Mr. David “—and very secret. So secret that I’m not allowed to tell you about it.”

  He paused. “But when you do that sort of work, Clarkie—when you do it as well as he does—you make enemies. Like people who don’t agree with you, or even people who want your job. You know the sort of people.” He nodded towards the closed door. “Like the fat one out there—he’s been waiting a long time for David—for Dr. Audley—to make a mistake—“

  “But he’s only gone off on holiday, Mr. Richardson, sir,” Mrs. Clark protested. “They haven’t been away together, not for a proper holiday anyway, since little Charlotte was born. And they both needed a holiday, ‘specially Mr. David. He’s been like a bear with a sore head just recently, he has.”

  Richardson’s heart sank: in her own innocence she was only confirming Oliver St. John Latimer.

  “And they’d planned this for a long time, had they?”

  “Lord—no, sir! Mr. David only decided just a few days ago. And he was that excited—he hadn’t been like that since the baby came, sir—he had us running to get everything ready. He was like a boy with a new bicycle, sir!”

  “Excited?” Richardson grabbed at the word like an exhausted swimmer reaching for a lifebelt. “You mean happy?”

  “Happy as a sandboy, sir—and so was Mrs. Audley to see him like it. He’d been that grumpy with us both, and then suddenly he was laughing and joking—“

  “Because of the holiday?”

  “Well, I suppose so, sir. But it was the night of the dinner party he first brightened up.”

  “The dinner party,” Richardson grinned at her. He mustn’t spoil it now, letting elation outrun discretion—there was much more to come still if he played his cards in the right order. “You mean it was one of your apple pies that put him in a good mood?”

  The dinner party. … He mustn’t probe too quickly into that, or too obviously. She was staring at him now as though she sensed the lightening of his mood, but the slackening of tension was bringing her closer to tears.

  He leaned forward and patted her knee again. “It’s okay, Clarkie —I really am on your side—on your side and on Charlie’s and on David’s. And between us I reckon we’ve got ‘em where we want ‘em—the other side.”

  She drew a long breath. “You mean you can do that—what you said you could—for him?”

  “I can and I will. But they couldn’t do anything to him anyway, you know—not when it was self-defence and he’d got Laurie Deacon speaking up for him.” He smiled. “You never really had anything to worry about.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know, sir. Charlie’s quiet and he seems slowlike, but he’s got a terrible temper when he’s roused. When we were children he near killed another boy once—he’d been teasing Charlie, you see. And there was that business during the war.”

  “What business was that? He’s never talked about it.”

  “He wouldn’t, no. But it’s still there in his mind after all this time, I know, because he has nightmares about it. Not often, he doesn’t, now. But he used to have them regular as clockwork.”

  “About the war?”

  “About this farmhouse in France, sir.” She stared at him doubtfully, then at the edge of the table. “I never told anyone about it before exactly, not even Mr. David… But there was this farmhouse… Charlie hadn’t done any fighting, because he was in the pioneers and they were retreating. And they were bombed a lot by those aeroplanes that made a screaming noise—“

  “Dive bombers.”

  “He didn’t call them that—Stinkers he called them.”

  “Stukas.”

  “That’s it, sir. All the way back until they were near Dunkirk. And the Germans were right behind them then, almost mixed up with them, you might say. And they sent Charlie and some other soldiers to find out if they was in this farmhouse. At night it was—that was really why it was. They couldn’t really see what they were doing, you see—“

  She was staring at the table edge as if it fascinated her.

  “And there was Germans in it. One of them shot at Charlie on the stairway, and Charlie killed him. And then he went up and there was another, and he killed him too. And then he heard this door open, and he went at it with his bayonet, sir—it was dark, and eve
ryone was shouting and shootin’—“

  She raised her eyes to his at last. “It was the farmer’s wife, sir. But he couldn’t see, that was the trouble—it was so dark. And when she screamed out, then the fanner came for him, tryin’ to stop him I suppose, and he—he—he didn’t know—“

  She was pleading with him now.

  “It’s all right, Clarkie. Of course he couldn’t know. No one could have known—it could have happened to anyone. He shouldn’t blame himself.”

  “That’s just it, sir. He doesn’t even remember it, or he doesn’t seem to remember it clearly, like it was mixed up with the nightmares in his mind.”

  “But he’s told you about it.”

  “No, sir. That was what the army doctor told me in the hospital when he came back, when he wasn’t himself like. He’d got it all written down, the doctor had. That’s why—“ She stopped, staring at him.

  That’s why.

  Richardson stared back, seeing at last, fully and clearly, right through the pathetic tangle.

  He could see her fear now, the reason that had shut her mouth: taken by itself, what Charlie had done was no more than pure self-defence, a reflex action. But if this old horror had been resurrected— the big, simple soldier, more likely wilder with fright than with anger, slaughtering a couple of innocent civilians in the dark and by accident, and then cracking up when he’d found out what he’d done—!

  He ought to have realised that Clarkie’s fear was a practical one, not an emotional response: she might guess what it would do to old Charlie to have that night raked up in court, that memory he’d locked away self-defensively in his subconscious mind. But what she feared was the doctor’s record, the dusty proof not only of Charlie’s mental instability but also that once before he had killed first and questioned afterwards.

  “And it was my fault, Mr. Richardson, sir—I forgot clean about it when I saw the light up here. I made him come, he didn’t want to.”

  So it wasn’t for David’s sake, to cover his disappearance, that she had kept quiet, that at least was certain; David had simply become the victim of her concern for Charlie.

  But David was no defector, that was certain too: the traitor who came to the end of his tether and was forced to abandon his home and his fortune and his country would never have made his getaway happy as a sandboy, excited as a boy with a new bicycle!

  He nodded reassuringly at her. “Don’t you fret, Clarkie—it’s going to be all right, I promise you. I’ll see that Charlie’s in the clear, don’t you worry.”

  But equally David would not have swanned off so happily without any by-your-leave—not when he’d been acting the way he had—unless he’d been up to something, that too had to be faced.

  David was no defector, certainly. But unlike old Charlie, David was still in trouble.

  “But first I’d like to know a bit more about that dinner of yours, Clarkie,” said Richardson.

  V

  BOSELLI WAS a long way out of line and he knew it; it was this knowledge rather than the first heat of the day which now raised the prickle of perspiration on his back.

  He had never stepped out of line like this before, at least not so dangerously. But this, he admitted candidly to himself, was partly because his work rarely exposed him to such temptations. Indeed, it had been one of his little tasks to watch for signs of such curiosity in others—what the General described as the itch to know a little too much for their own good—and he had become adept at spotting them. Only now he was beginning for the first time to sympathise with the deviationists.

  He looked up and down the narrow street suspiciously. The prospect of the General’s discovery that he was being surreptitiously investigated by one of his own staff didn’t really bear thinking about; it made him shiver at the same time as he perspired, which in turn made him remember inconsequentially that his wife had said only yesterday that she had gone “all hot and cold” after nearly being run over by some foreign driver who’d tried to change his mind in the Via Labicana. He’d been on the point of telling her that such a contradictory physical condition was unlikely, and here he was experiencing it himself.

  He paused at a street fountain and drank greedily from it. It seemed to have a bitter flavour, but he knew that it was not the water, only the taste already in his mouth.

  He splashed his face and wiped it with his silk handkerchief, glancing again up and down the street. It was the General’s fault, anyway, even if that was one excuse he would never dare to advance openly. The Ruelle File started—or appeared to start—with impossible abruptness in 1944, as though George Ruelle had sprung from the ground full-grown into the middle management ranks of the newly-respectable Italian Communist Party. From nowhere usually meant from Moscow, but that clearly didn’t apply in Ruelle’s case; he had been fighting in the south in ‘43, if not earlier, and his first Moscow trip had not been until ‘46—there was no mystery about those dates. Indeed, there wasn’t even any mystery as to just where that missing pre-1944 section of the dossier was: it was reposing safely in the General’s own safe—no betting man, Boselli would happily have bet his last lire on that, at hundred to one odds.

  Under cover of folding the handkerchief Boselli took a final look at the street. Nothing, as far as he could see, had changed and no one was watching him. Which left him with the reassuring but galling probability that there was no one on his tail and that the General had given him this task because he was the least likely of all men to scratch that dangerous itch.

  Half a dozen hurried steps carried him across the pavement and into the alleyway—well, for once the great General hadn’t been as clever as he thought he’d been.

  Frugoni’s apartment—it was a ridiculous exaggeration to call two crummy little rooms an apartment—was predictably jammed under the eaves, without any access to the roof, a rathole fit for a rat.

  And that was good, thought Boselli as he knocked sharply on the scarred door: the worse off Frugoni was (and with any luck he would have gone considerably farther downhill since he had last come round bumming for a handout), the cheaper his tongue would be to loosen. There ought to be some juicy expenses in this work, but Frugoni’s name could never be listed in the accounting so there was no question of generosity, real or fabricated, in his case.

  “Who is it?”

  That was the voice, the hoarse whine rather.

  “Boselli—Pietro Boselli.”

  “Who? Pietro who?” The whine was suspicious, as though its owner was accustomed to bad news knocking at his door. “I don’t know any Pietro.”

  “Pietro Boselli—General Montuori’s personal assistant.” Boselli paused to let the names sink into the man’s befuddled mind. “I’ve got something for you, Signor Frugoni.”

  “Something for me?”

  “That’s right. Open up.”

  There was a rattle as Frugoni feverishly attempted to open his own door, only to discover that he had bolted it top and bottom as well as securing it with what sounded like an old-fashioned padlock. It took him a full two minutes of clumsy grappling with the lock and alcoholic puffing and blowing with the bolts to relax its defences. And even then it caught on the uneven floor and shuddered so violently that it was a tossup whether it wouldn’t fall to pieces before it was finally opened.

  Frugoni peered at him uneasily in the greenish light from the unwashed landing window.

  “You remember me, Signor Frugoni,” said Boselli patiently. “We last met when you—ah—consulted the General two or three years ago. About your pension.”

  “My pension?” Frugoni looked at him stupidly.

  “Your war wound, I believe—or a war disability of some sort,” Boselli prompted him with helpful vagueness. “The General didn’t tell me the exact details, but I gathered that you and he were old comrades. Once comrades, always comrades—that’s what he said.”

  Frugoni blinked and screwed up his face with the unexpected mental effort needed to resolve the enormous gap between what he mu
st remember had actually happened when he tried to touch the General for a sucker’s handout, and the rose-tinted pack of lies he had just heard.

  In fact no one knew the extent of that gap better than Boselli himself. It had devolved on him to check up on the man’s tear-jerking tale of a veteran fallen on unmerited hard times, and he had very soon found the General’s suspicions to be well-founded. Frugoni had fallen not so much on hard times as through the skylight of the restaurant he had been robbing—his “war wound” had been the compound fracture of the leg and the mild concussion which had resulted from this descent.

  Central criminal records had also revealed that in addition to being an inveterate and unsuccessful petty thief, Frugoni was a quarrelsome boozer who had abandoned his wife and children—it had been that last detail, rather than the man’s actual misdemeanours, which had finally directed the General’s charity—

  “Put the woman on my list then, Boselli—she’s probably better off without him anyway.”

  “What about the man, sir?”

  “Leave him to me. It’ll be a pleasure to kick his backside again after all these years…”

  “My wound—of course!” Frugoni twitched into full consciousness. “You must pardon me, Signor Boselli—naturally I remember you— but my health, you understand…” He heaved a gallant sigh “… at my age things are hard.”

  Boselli nodded sympathetically.

  “Not that I am grumbling, you understand,” Fragoni added hastily, uncertain of the most profitable role open to him until he could establish just how much Boselli knew. “But let us not speak of such things. You said—I believe you said—?”

  “That I have something for you. That is correct. But something in turn for something, Signor Frugoni. Perhaps I might step inside for a moment, yes?”

  Frugoni regarded him in complete bewilderment; the possibility that he possessed something—anything—which was likely to be saleable, but of which he was totally unaware, seemed to have knocked away what little balance he could muster so early in the day.

  “I—but of course, Signor Boselli—“