War Game

by Anthony Price

  This wasn’t anyone’s dog, it was someone’s dog. And the someone must be close at hand—and on the wrong side of the wire.

  He dropped the loop into place and turned his full attention to the setter.

  “Here, girl,” he commanded conversationally, extending the licked hand for further examination. “Have a good smell, eh?”

  The bitch strained forward towards the hand, first sniffing and then slobbering over each finger in turn, tail beating with excitement. When he was confident that she was sure of him Audley bent over her, slid his sticky hand over her head and eased the collar sideways so that he could read the name on the brass plate.

  Burton, Castle Lodge, Standingham.

  “There’s a girl—there’s a beautiful girl.” He stroked the sleek head. “Aren’t you a beautiful girl then?”

  The bitch nodded at him, steadied and soothed by the sound and the touch. If only she could speak now she would have answered all his questions; instead she offered a dusty paw.

  Audley shook the paw. “Pleased to meet you.”

  But where’s your master, beautiful girl? Is this the way he comes down from the Lodge to take his evening pint? Is he close by now, beautiful girl?

  The bitch cocked her head on one side, looked straight at him, and then looked directly over his shoulder.

  Audley straightened up slowly to give himself time to gather all his wits together, and then turned to look along her line of sight.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  The setter’s master was a tall, thin man with an all-weather face and an upstanding brush of grey hair less well-groomed than his dog’s coat.

  “’Evening.”

  A quiet-spoken man too, though his voice seemed to release the setter from Audley’s spell: she leapt up the side of the gap and came to heel obediently at the sound of it.

  “You’ve got a good bitch there,” said Audley.

  “Aye.” Absently, without taking his eyes off Audley, the man—Mr. Burton, I presume—reached down to touch her head, and she quivered with pleasure at the touch.

  “Maybe a little too friendly with strangers, though,” said Audley, smiling.

  The grey brush shook disagreement. “Not usually. If you were a bad ‘un she’d set her teeth to you, likely.”

  Well, that was a compliment. And if Burton trusted his dog’s instinct perhaps David Audley should trust his own also— and play to win when there was nothing left to lose. He was the wrong side of the wire after all, clear beyond the notice to trespassers.

  He cocked his head on one side as the dog had done. “Oh aye? Then I take it she’s left her mark on Master Ratcliffe already then?”

  For a long moment Burton considered him. Then one corner of his mouth lifted. “Would have done if I’d let her,” he admitted.

  Audley nodded, first at the man and then at the dog. He’d made the gesture and it hadn’t been rejected. But the next move wasn’t his.

  Another moment passed. “You wouldn’t be from a newspaper, I don’t think?” It was more a reflection spoken aloud than a question. Or if a question, thought Audley, remembering his old Latin master, it was a num question, with the answer 120 built into it.

  “No, I’m not from a newspaper. But I want to see what they weren’t allowed to see all the same.”

  For a second or two after he had spoken Audley was afraid he had gone too far too fast. But instinct was still in charge, and instinct was all on the side of frankness now.

  The man took a step forward and offered his hand. “Well then … you’d better come up out of there then, hadn’t you?” he said simply.

  Help evidently didn’t include conversation; Burton simply led the way along the path on the rampart, zigzagging between the trees in silence while the setter bitch rushed ahead in an attempt to discover the longest distance between two points. On their right the ditch was so choked with undergrowth that the counter-scarp and glacis slope were almost invisible; on the left Audley caught occasional glimpses through the trees of the house itself, all windows and chimneys. On this south side it was quite close to the defences, he remembered from the Reverend Musgrave’s map.

  He could have found his way to the kitchen garden just as well on his own, and Sergeant Digby would be worried sick at Burton’s failure to arrive on schedule, so this turn of events would have little profit to it if he couldn’t persuade the man to talk. But however eloquent his agreement with his bitch—that Charlie Ratcliffe was a bad ‘un—he didn’t look like a talkative man.

  Audley quickened his pace. “You know Master Charlie well, do you?”

  For a dozen paces Burton gave no sign of having even heard the question. Then, without pausing, he spoke over his shoulder.

  “Not really—since he was a nipper.”

  Audley waited for elaboration, but none came. With a man like this, a man of few words, every word had to work an eight-hour day.

  “He came here when he was young?”

  “Aye.”

  “And not since—up until now?”

  “Aye.” Pause. “But he’s not changed, though.”

  That confirmed the record. Charlie hadn’t really got on with either his cousin or his uncle, whose political and social persuasions were very different from his. He was the faute de mieux inheritor of an impoverished estate for which he had shown no love and in which he had shown no interest until very recently.

  “What was he like—as a boy?”

  Burton took another dozen paces and then halted. Half turning he waited for Audley to come alongside him. They stared at one another in silence.

  “What you after, mister?” The question was as direct as the stare.

  “Information.”

  “To cause trouble?”

  No lies, thought Audley. Burton would smell a lie as quickly as his bitch smelt a rabbit.

  “No.”

  Burton stiffened. “No?”

  “The trouble has already been caused. And I didn’t cause it. What I cause isn’t called trouble.”

  There was a rustle of leaves and the bitch appeared, summoned by the tension between them. She came to heel again precisely as she had done at their first meeting, and Burton reached down in exactly the same way to touch her head. It was as though there was a current passing between them.

  Audley reached forward, offering his right hand to the bitch again.

  Lick or bite?

  He felt the warm, wet tongue on his fingers.

  “What was he like when he was a boy?” he repeated the question.

  Burton nodded slowly. “Same as now. A chancer.”

  A chancer?

  What was a chancer? Something more —or less—than an opportunist. A taker of risks, a twister—

  “He never cared for nobody born, nor nothing made, nor nothing growed.” Burton paused. “He never did, and he never will. Not till he’s six foot under.”

  The bitch shivered at the pronouncement of this anathema and Burton swung back on to the path, releasing her and striding away. All the words he had to give on Charlie Ratcliffe had been said.

  The trees ended abruptly on the ruin of a corner bastion and the rampart curved away along the crest of the ridge above open country. Audley realised that they had been following the contour line all the way round the spur of land on which the house had been built—having seen it he could no longer think of it as a castle, despite its name. And here, on the northern and more open side—this must be the Reverend Musgrave’s “pleasant open valley”—only the chimneys were visible.

  And sure enough, there across the valley on the lower ridge above the Harwell beyond it, were the earth walls of the old castle, four or five hundred yards away. Obviously it had been built above the original village which the Black Death had wiped out; and built long before the days of gunpowder and cannon which made it a death-trap under any guns planted on this higher ridge. No wonder the Cavaliers had found this a hard Roundhead nut to crack! For, with the lie of the land to his advantage,
old Sir Edmund had raised his glacis and rampart simply by moving the earth from the great ditch between them, leaving the ridge to do the rest of the work of shielding his manor.

  Burton had stopped and was pointing along the rampart.

  Audley took the guide-book from his pocket and opened the map. The walled kitchen garden was sited half way along the southern defence line, tucked behind “The Great Bastion”. Within it, right next to the bastion itself, was a small cross marked “The Memorial” … well, here at least the Double R Society wouldn’t have to expend any of its funds on a pious monument to the real thing. He turned back to the text—

  “… a second and final disaster. For, having given shelter to a party of Roundheads led by his kinsman Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, a trusted lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Edmund was more fiercely assaulted by the Royalists than ever before. By this time, however, he was reduced to casting his own ammunition with lead from the castle roof and making his own gunpowder with materials prudently laid in store; and it was while attending to the latter that he was killed in the explosion of a magazine behind the north wall.”

  Oh, careless Sir Edmund! Once might be called bad luck, but twice—well, that lesson ought to have been better learnt …

  “History does not relate whether this misfortune was due to inadvertence or to a stray shot from the enemy, for there was none left to tell the tale; all that is certain is that he and his principal officers perished instantly in the ensuing disaster in circumstances and upon the very spot that are recalled by a monument raised by his posterity, Mr. Algernon Ratcliffe JP, esteemed father of the present Lord of the Manor, upen the two hundredth anniversary of its tragic occurrence:

  “Stranger! Now gaze on gallant Steyning’s urn,

  Who ne’er upon the foe his noble back did turn,

  But, Earth to Heaven, was untimely sent

  By fierce explosion. Mark the dire event!

  Once close besieged, now by dread

  Death set free,

  Lord, from Life’s Battle take my Soul to Thee!

  “Now, once again, we may observe the role of the hero in the divine plan, which the death of the noble General Gordon at Khartum in recent times must surely remind the reader. For, deprived of Sir Edmund’s guiding hand and implacable resolve, the defences on that instant crumbled. The great cannon being dismounted (which it had been his constant charge to play upon the foe), the enemy burst in upon the defenders at that point, scattering all before them. Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor of the explosion, took to horse and essayed to escape (and who shall cry ‘faint heart’ or ‘treachery’ in such an extremity?), only to perish in the carnage which ensued.”

  The gold, thought Audley suddenly. Why was there no mention of the gold?

  Burton waved at him again.

  “Just coming.”

  “For sure it was that, as the holding of Standingham had been a great feat of arms, so was its overthrow the more terrible. In a letter to King Charles (who had furnished him with a body of soldiers, together with siege armament), Lord Monson wrote: ‘In the extirpation of this nest of viperous rebels above 200 persons were slain, and an hundred taken prisoner, mostly of the baser sort: together with a great store of plate and all manner of household stuff, together with gold and silver pieces, being the fortune of the late owner, to the value of 3,500 1., other than that taken by our soldiers, they being in the heat, of battle.’ Here it was that dark deeds were committed, it being rumoured that Colonel Parrott had brought with him a great treasure into the castle. But that brave man being beyond the power of his enemies to question, and certain poor prisoners revealing nothing, even upon torture, no part of this was ever discovered (giving rise to the legend which is even yet cherished by local folk); this even though much further damage was wrought to the fabric of the house and surviving buildings, the which was laid at Lord Monson’s door, so that when he was shortly afterwards slain by a bullet through the mouth at the battle of Newbury it was said of him that ‘he sought the gold and drank the blood of the godly in his life, but he found but one ball of lead and drank his own blood in his death’.”

  Nasty. The sack of Standingham had been nasty—the proportion of killed to captured emphasised that as no mere words could—and the exultation of the Godly Reverend Musgrave over Lord Monson’s come-uppance was nasty too. But what was certain was that Charlie Ratcliffe hadn’t derived much use from the Musgrave History, because Musgrave obviously rated the gold no higher than legend and rumour.

  Burton was waiting for him beside an enormous cannon, Sir Edmund’s original monster now bedded in a carriage of stone and set in the middle of the bastion between two pyramids of equally ancient cannonballs. But Audley had eyes neither for the man nor the gun, only for the kitchen garden behind and beneath them.

  Killed in the explosion of a magazine behind the north wall—

  But that had been over three hundred years ago, not the day before yesterday!

  And yet there, directly below him, was a huge raw crater in the earth, surrounded by all the debris of an explosion: uprooted apple trees, dead in full leaf with the fruit hanging obscenely at unnatural angles, crushed rose bushes in bloom and piles of broken stone half buried in heaps of soil. Even beyond the area of total devastation the garden was scarred by wheel tracks which ran straight across flower beds and neat grass paths as though they hadn’t existed. The whole place looked as though a battle had been fought across it, like the gardens of Normandy after D-Day. The fact that it had been a garden in full bloom, full of fruit and flowers, somehow made the scene more horrible; but what made it worse even than that was the feeling that the destruction beyond the crater had not really been mere carelessness, but a deliberate act, with each tractor journey cutting through a different and hitherto undamaged area.

  Burton read the stricken expression on his face. “Makes a man feel sick, don’t it?”

  Audley nodded. Sick was the right word. If a child had done this the stick would have been needed; in an adult, the psychiatrist.

  “Did he hate you, from way back?”

  Burton shook his head. “Didn’t even remember my name. Them, maybe he did … maybe he didn’t. I can’t rightly say.”

  “But they’re dead.”

  “Aye.” Burton surveyed the ruin of his work. “She loved flowers when she was alive, the old lady did. Roses and dahlias and chrysanths, mostly. And daffs in the spring … filled the house with ‘em. And after she died the old man kept them on. Said they reminded him of her, like.” He stopped suddenly, as though he felt he’d spoken too much.

  Audley stared down at the pile of stones. He could make out the top of a cross with one arm broken off short, and nearby lay an accusing fragment of inscription:

  MARK THE DIRE EVENT!

  So that was the way of it: to get at the gold Charlie Ratcliffe had torn up the memorial to his ancestor with no thought of reassembling it afterwards.

  But that absence of piety in Charlie Ratcliffe was hardly surprising; what was surprising was that he had known exactly where to dig. And, judging by the depth of the crater, where to dig deep indeed.

  I put myself into Nathaniel Parrott’s shoes.

  Hiding a ton of gold ingots presented a great many problems, the more so when it had to be done in the middle of a siege, with the garrison all around. For if Parrott and Steyning had decided that the castle was doomed they could hardly rely on death shutting all the mouths of those who might have an idea of the hiding place.

  Although in fact death had done just that very neatly indeed.

  Too neatly?

  And, by God, death had also covered up the hiding place too, for this was the site of the original explosion—the site of the powder magazine.

  Audley stared into the crater. Clever and devious and ruthless, Nayler had said, and they’d been all of that, Parrott and Steyning—all of that and more.

  The powder magazine would have been strictly out of bounds.

  They had dug th
eir hole in it, and dug far deeper than was necessary.

  And then filled it in.

  And then made a brand new hole above it—and who would think of looking for a hole in the bottom of another hole?

  And they had killed the men who had hidden the treasure at the same time.

  Audley frowned. The men had included Edmund Steyning himself.

  Parrott.

  “Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor among the senior officers, took to horse and essayed to escape—“

  The murderous bastard!

  The murderous double-crossing bastard.

  “You got what you came for?” The question was a formality; Burton had been watching him intently.

  “Yes.”

  Like Nathaniel Parrott—like Charlie Ratcliffe: it had maybe taken a murderer to spot a murderer.

  “That’s good, then,” said Burton.

  Not really so good, thought Audley. There was nothing more here for him, on the scene of a successful seventeenth-century crime. If there was any chance of catching Charlie Ratcliffe it could only be somewhere back on the site of the twentieth-century crime, beside the Swine Brook.

  6

  AUDLEY hated English heatwaves. He could put up with foreign hot weather, even Washington weather, which was natural and inevitable. But English heat was like a betrayal by an old and dear friend whose greatest virtue had hitherto been a comfortable and reliable moderation.

  And worst of all was hot English darkness, which always made him wonder, when he awoke after a few minutes (or was it a few hours?) of sweaty, unrefreshing sleep, whether he was in England at all.

  He reached across tentatively under the single sheet to reassure himself. There were only two thighs in the world like that. Once upon a long ago time there had been other thighs, but none of them had had Faith’s superb temperature control, cool in summer and warm in winter.

  He was at home in his own bed in the midst of a heatwave, with the weathermen’s records melting one by one around him—

  Not since the summer of 1948 …