War Game

by Anthony Price

  Protect the scene of the crime.

  Much more likely, even if the body had been discovered sooner rather than later, would have been these destructive moments of chaos which usually attended presumed accidents. People milling around in panic or ghoulish curiosity, moving the body, trampling the place flat and obliterating any shred of evidence or circumstance that there might be. With only a little luck here on Swine Brook Field— with a battle going on nearby and seven thousand spectators poised to stampede down the hillside—there wouldn’t have been any scene of the crime left by the time any sort of trained observer reached the spot. And then, with just a little more luck, there might not have been any crime, just an unfortunate but comprehensible accident of the sort discerning coppers like Weston had foreseen.

  But a little luck had gone the other way for once, in the presence of Sergeant Henry Digby.

  And doubly the other way… .

  Audley frowned. “Why did you come here and look, Sergeant?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  Audley realised that he had been staring down into the still pool so long that the Sergeant had moved away from him. “I’m sorry… . You were on station down there—“ he pointed towards the clump of willow trees “—and then you came up here to look for Ratcliffe. Why did you do that?”

  Digby stared at him for a moment. “But it wasn’t to look for Ratcliffe, sir. It was because of the dye—“

  Such a curious thing, utterly unforeseeable, had made the best-laid scheme go agley. In less fatal circumstances a joke, and even now a piece of the blackest comedy.

  The durability of Durex contraceptives.

  It seemed likely, thought Audley, that James Ratcliffe had practical experience of their resistance, for he had taped no less than eight of them to his body, four at the front and four at the back, when the explosion of any one in each place would have been sufficiently effective to simulate death by cannonball.

  Would have—and had been. For he had been carried out of the battle with most of them still intact, still loaded with air and red dye, and it had taken the spikes of the hawthorns and brambles against which he had fallen and over which he had been rolled to puncture the rest of them.

  Dye on the ground, where he had fallen.

  Dye on the edge of the bank, where he had been rolled.

  And most of all dye in the Swine Brook itself, the tell-tale stain of which had eventually carried its message downstream to Sergeant Digby, who of all people happened to be the one best trained and disposed to read it.

  “It was because of the dye—coming down from above where I was putting it in. So I knew somebody was playing silly buggers upstream from where I was.”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “If it was the same stuff I was putting into the water it didn’t matter, because that was non-toxic. But there are dyes and dyes. If there was some idiot adding a toxic chemical to the water there could be hell to pay downstream, where farm animals drank from it—it could have cost the society a fortune in damages. That’s why I went to find out double-quick.”

  “I see. So you came to this gap first and found Ratcliffe in the water straight off?”

  “Not straight off, sir. But I saw traces of the dye on the ground, where the contraceptives had burst. And the whole pool was red by then.”

  Blood everywhere. And not a drop spilt. “That must have given you a nasty shock.”

  “It gave me a shock when I looked over the edge of the bank and found Jim Ratcliffe, I can tell you, sir.”

  Audley nodded. “In what you rightly took to be suspicious circumstances?”

  The sergeant lifted his hands in an oddly uncharacteristic gesture of doubt. “Well, sir … it wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. I had to make sure as far as I could that he was dead first. There’s—there’s a routine for this sort of situation.”

  “Of course.” Audley watched the young man closely. “Yet your suspicions were aroused very quickly, were they not?”

  Digby’s jaw tightened. “Yes, sir.”

  “Because of the way the body was tucked in under the bank, and the blobs of dye on the ground where he had fallen —and so on?”

  “Yes, sir.” A muscle in the young man’s cheek twitched nervously. “I believed there was a possibility of foul play.”

  “And not … an accidental blow with the butt of a pike, say. During the rout?”

  Digby steadied. “The body was in the stream before that.”

  “But that would have been … only a matter of minutes. How can you be so sure?”

  Without a word Digby bent down and plucked a handful of dry grass from the edge of the pool. Then he leant over and dropped the handful into the water under the overhang.

  “Watch, sir,” he said simply.

  Audley watched. For a few moments he thought the grass was stationary. Then, almost imperceptibly, it began to move upstream: here, in the still pool above the natural dam of winter debris there was a lazy backcurrent. Whatever entered it was carried in a slow circle, round and round, until it sank or was caught by the band of accumulated scum at the lip of the dam.

  Digby followed his glance and pointed. “The stream doesn’t go over the top there, you can see—there isn’t much water coming down, with the drought we’ve had, and there wasn’t then either. It just seeps through underneath.”

  Audley eyed the drifting grass, substituting for it in his imagination the thread of dye which would have unwound from Ratcliffe’s body in the sluggish movement of the water. And as it unwound it would have spread until the stain filled the pool … and only then would it begin to sink to find the chinks in the dam …

  Not just sharp, but bloody sharp. Almost too bloody sharp to be true, was Sergeant Digby.

  “How long did it take to reach you, then?”

  “Not less than fifteen minutes.” There was no sign of doubt and nervousness now. “And fifteen minutes before I found the body the rout hadn’t started. Nobody broke ranks before the final attack, either —I know, because I was watching. And that was the way it was planned, too.”

  “Planned?”

  “That’s right. The first two attacks, the dead and wounded were carried back to the stream. But after that they lay where they fell—for effect …” Digby trailed off, momentarily embarrassed.

  Audley studied him for a few seconds, then turned back towards the pool. “And you took one look, and smelt a rat— because of the time factor … that’s what it amounts to, does it?”

  The muscle twitched again. “You could say that, sir—yes.”

  “I am saying that, Sergeant. If it had been after the rout you might have put it down to accident, but before the rout you weren’t so sure—is that it?”

  “I couldn’t see how it had happened when it did happen, yes sir.”

  “Good.” Audley lifted his gaze back to the sergeant. “Well then, Sergeant, I’d be obliged if you’d tell me how the devil you knew there was a time factor at all?”

  “Sir?” Digby frowned at him.

  Audley hardened his expression. “How did you know so much about the behaviour of the stream?”

  Digby relaxed abruptly. “Oh—that.”

  “That, yes.”

  “Because we don’t leave anything to chance, sir.” Digby smiled at him innocently. “When we stage a battle we do it properly. … So I gave the dye a trial run a week before, to find the best place for it, and I tried this pool first because the gap here was more sheltered than the one downstream. But it took too long—and it spread the dye too much.” He pointed downstream. “What we needed was for the water to be good and red where Black Thomas was due to drink it, and still pink when it reached the road bridge where the crowd could see it. So in the end we decided on the big willow as the best place.”

  “We?”

  “The Special Effects Section … sir,” amended the sergeant politely.

  Good boy, thought Audley. If you have to kick the top brass, always kick them pol
itely.

  “I see. And everyone knew about this, I take it?”

  “It’s in the battle scenario, sir— Appendix F.” Digby nodded. “Everyone has to know exactly what’s happening, otherwise things are bound to go wrong. We’ve learnt that by bitter experience. So you see—“

  Audley smiled into the stillness of his study, remembering the sergeant’s meticulous account of the battle of Swine Brook Field with admiration.

  Such a curious mixture, that account had been. Mostly it was still the formal recollection of a policeman trained to give evidence, but every now and then the youthful Civil War buff shone through, illuminating a sombre landscape of fact with shafts of enthusiasm.

  He thought of Digby lying in the narrow bed in the spare room at the end of the passage, which had once been his own childhood bedroom, and realised without surprise that the thought was already edged with something close to affection.

  It was hard to think of the boy as a police sergeant. If he had married young he could have had a son that age, and Digby could have occupied that bed as of right. To have a sharp son like that to put him in his place would be rather agreeable… .

  He was growing old, and the measure of his years was that he was already beginning to relive his youth through those who still had the whole exciting game to play … and who could still do all the things he had somehow missed doing.

  Neither Faith nor Superintendent Weston needed to worry: he would keep an eye on young Henry Digby. A protective eye.

  And the irony now was that in that very responsibility lay the key to the murder of James Ratcliffe on Swine Brook Field, which Weston and Digby himself had both missed.

  The red dye—the tell-tale red dye—had been an unforeseen accident. But Henry Digby’s presence twenty yards from the killing had been a well-known fact. A fact well known to Charlie Ratcliffe.

  A fact Charlie Ratcliffe could not afford to overlook: Sergeant Digby of the Mid-Wessex Police Force.

  He stared down at the four names which he had written on his blotter.

  8

  ON THE CORNER of Easingbridge Village Green nearest the Ploughman’s Arms public house a yellow-coated musketeer was vomiting up his heart and a quantity of beer, oblivious of his admiring audience of small children. Two of his comrades, obviously in little better condition, lay stretched out on the grass nearby, their muskets and bandoliers at their side. And from the pub itself came the sound of drunken, but nonetheless distinct singing—

  Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair?

  Parlez-vous, parlez-vous!

  Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair,

  With lily-white tits and golden hair?

  Inky-pinky parlez-vous.

  Audley manoeuvred the 2200 into a vacant slot in the pub forecourt, reflecting as he did so that if the song was anachronistic (“Three German Officers crossed the Rhine”, which as he recalled was its first line, if not its title, could hardly be earlier than 1914), the condition of the singers was no doubt historically impeccable: from the position of the village on the western slope of the Easing valley, with the river between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell’s advancing raiders, the cavaliers must have been stoned out of their minds to let their enemies round them up so easily in broad daylight back in 1644. Mere incompetence couldn’t stretch that far, only booze would answer the case.

  He switched off the engine and picked up the leaflet which had been thrust through his window at the traffic jam by the bridge. It was crudely printed, but the map on one side told its story simply and directly: Cromwell, the cunning sod, had feinted at the bridge to draw the Royalists’ attention directly across the river while actually sending the greater part of his brigade up river to cross by a convenient ford. Once across the river, his men had swept down on the enemy’s flank; whereupon the attackers at the bridge had advanced in earnest and had turned the Royalist defeat into a rout.

  It all looked nice and clear-cut; suspiciously so, indeed. But the reality had probably been very different, he thought, remembering what Captain (alias Sergeant) Henry Digby had told him that very morning. This had actually been the future dictator’s very first truly independent command, the raid to stop the King transferring his artillery from the Severn Valley to Oxford. If he had fluffed it, the odds were that he might not have been given his chance as Fairfax’s second-in-command in the coming campaign—the Naseby campaign which made his reputation as a cavalry general.

  By the time he’d reached the Easing valley he’d already fought two successful actions, smashing three of the Earl of Northampton’s regiments in Oxfordshire and then bluffing the Bletchingdon House garrison into surrender. But he still had everything to play for, and it would all have gone for nothing if those Royalist pickets at the upstream ford had been made of sterner stuff.

  He stared down at the crumpled paper in his hand, at the black arrow which marked the line of the approach march, the river crossing and the flank attack. So that was how it had been done.

  Old Cow Ford.

  It wasn’t even a proper name—more likely it had been just “the old cow ford near Easingbridge”. But that was where history had been made—and changed— nevertheless.

  Sweating, muddy horses and sweating, swearing men filing through the thick woods above the valley; jingling harness drowned by the distant sound of musket fire and cannon downstream, and maybe also diverting the attention of the Royalist pickets—“The buggers’ll be catching it down by the bridge. Better them than us, though”; and then the terrible long cavalry swords drawn, the straight basket-hiked swords of the New Model Army …

  And then General Cromwell’s men were across the Old Cow Ford. And General Cromwell was on his way to the Cotswolds —and to Naseby, and the Palace of Westminster and the conquest of three kingdoms.

  Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke, foolishly believing a false report that Cromwell had been defeated and slain by Lord Goring, allowed his men to partake of a great quantity of fresh-brewed ale, so that on the morrow they were in no condition to withstand the onset of the Ironsides, when they came upon them untimely—

  The black and white of the pamphlet registered. So he’d been literally and absolutely spot on with his first guess: in executing his flank attack (which, if it was well-advised, was still no great military innovation), God’s Chosen Instrument of Vengeance owed more to the stupidity of his adversary than to Divine Providence, which usually received the credit for Crowning Mercies in those far-off days. Though perhaps the presence of that “great quantity of fresh-brewed ale” was in the nature of Divine Providence at that, constituting as it did a temptation which no British soldiers—and above all no English cavaliers of the seventeenth century—could be expected to resist.

  But no matter. If there were such things as omens, it was a good omen that his instincts were working. And perhaps even a good omen twice over: Colonel Sir Edward Whitelocke had joined the great company of defeated commanders because he had thought himself in the clear, had relaxed his guard, and then had been stampeded into the wrong counter-action.

  And that, more or less, was the battle scenario for the defeat of Charlie Ratcliffe at this instant.

  A crash of broken glass within the Ploughman’s Arms, followed by a loud cheer, roused him from his military reflections just as a dark shadow loomed in the corner of his eye outside the car.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  The dark shadow was a large policeman.

  “Perfectly, thank you. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  The policeman sniffed suspiciously. “That’s not for me to say, sir. But I’ve been watching you for the last four or five minutes and—“

  There was another loud crash from the Ploughman, and a further outbreak of cheering which blended into the unforgettable strains of “The Ball of Kirriemuir”. The policeman, who was young and fresh-faced and astonishingly like Sergeant Digby, lifted his nose from the car window and gave the pub a long, hard look as though calculating the breaking-strength of its s
tructure under internal pressure.

  The distraction gave Audley a moment to gather his wits. He had been sitting hunched down, slumped as though asleep, outside a pub where a great quantity of ale, fresh-brewed or otherwise, was being consumed—slumped in a car.

  He was therefore about to be breathalysed.

  “You should be worrying about them, not me, officer.” He smiled up at the young constable.

  “Sir?” The candid eyes fastened on him again.

  “I said—you should be worrying about them.”

  “They aren’t in charge of cars, sir.”

  Trust the police to get their priorities exactly right. Good on you, copper!

  “Of course.” He passed up his identification card. “I’m on official business, officer … and, for the record, I haven’t had anything to drink, either.”

  The eyes scanned the card, checked the face against the photograph, scanned the card again.

  “Thank you, sir.” There was no change in the voice as the card came back through the window; a potential offender against section umpteen of the Road Traffic Act was no different, until breathalysed, from one of Her Majesty’s servants on his lawful occasion. “Can I be of assistance in any way?”

  “I’m looking for Bridge House—Air Vice-Marshal Rushworth.”

  “Just on down the road, sir. The big stone place directly overlooking the bridge —you can’t miss it.”

  “I see—thank you, officer.” Audley reached for the ignition.

  “But you’d do better to leave your car here, sir. I’ll keep an eye on it. The yard at Bridge House is full of horses.”