The Labyrinth Makers

by Anthony Price

  'If she'd loved him it would have been. But they didn't even like each other any more. Only she didn't know that until she'd heard herself say it–to me. Then I knew I wouldn't have to share her with him.'

  Audley cast a sidelong glance at Jones. Half a loaf would never have been good enough for him. The file had assessed him as an innocent bystander whose involvement with Steerforth had been accidental. Only his subsequent marriage with the man's widow made him suspect. But now that too could be discounted. Not only was there no likelihood that he was withholding anything on Steerforth, but it was unlikely also that Steerforth would have confided in a wife who bored him.

  Nevertheless Jones's own assessment of that last flight tallied usefully with Butler's and his own: it had the smell of a put-up job.

  The silence of the hillside was broken by the sound of a car climbing the gradient. As it reached the level stretch below them it began to accelerate, then slowed down and pulled into the verge beyond Audley's. Roskill got out and looked expectantly up at Audley.

  Again he had the feeling that the action was outrunning the script. For Roskill to disturb him like this only trouble was sufficient reason.

  He stumped down to the road with undignified haste.

  'I'm sorry to break in on you, Dr Audley,' Roskill apologised, 'but when I phoned in to the office to say I was coming home there was an urgent message for you. I'm to tell you that the professor–no names, just the professor -has been positively identified in East Berlin. And rumour puts him on a flight to London on Tuesday.'

  Audley blinked unhappily, and Roskill completely misconstrued his reaction.

  'I'm sorry it sounds so bloody mysterious, but that's exactly what the Harlin said, and I'm afraid it comes from that JIG character, not Fred.'

  Audley tried to think. A moment before the task ahead seemed reasonably clear, no matter how unfamiliar his own role in it was: a simple and leisurely reconstruction of the events of the last week in Steerforth's career, with the willing or unwilling help of the survivors of his crew. Panin had only been a potential complication.

  But now Panin was a reality, and Panin appeared to be on the move. And unlike Audley, Panin knew exactly what he was doing.

  He grasped the nettle. 'Hugh, I'm going back to London at once. You run Jones home and then get tracing the crew as fast as you can. Tell Butler to drop everything and get after the Belgian.'

  He turned towards Jones, who had stepped on to the road a discreet distance away.

  'Trouble?' There was a suggestion of amused sympathy in Jones's eyes.

  'What makes you think that, Mr Jones?'

  'The same reason I wasn't too surprised to see you. If you've got Steerforth, you've got trouble: you can't just bury men like Steerforth.'

  'You may have him too, Mr Jones.'

  'I've got a shotgun too. Just leave me your telephone number, and I'll let you know if I shoot something interesting.'

  III

  Audley stared from his study window out across the South Downs and tried to make sense of Nikolai Andrievich Panin.

  Usually he found it relaxing to watch the evening spread over that landscape, dissolving the familiar landmarks one by one. But Panin refused to let him relax on this evening.

  The Russian had to be the key to Steerforth. It was his involvement alone which had kept the dead pilot alive in the files over the last decade; it was his interest which- had aroused the department and had even provided Fred with an honourable way of sacking Audley: Panin was big enough to make the sack look like promotion.

  Big enough, but wholly enigmatic. For no one seemed to know what made Panin tick and what kept him wound up. He hadn't been tagged as a coming man until after he had arrived, and then it was too late. They had simply never caught up with him.

  Audley looked down at the thin file in front of him and the pathetic handful of notes he had made during the afternoon. Kremlinology was at best a foggy enterprise, more divination than detection, full of Delphic hypotheses about men whose passion for secrecy appeared at times to be pathological.

  But Panin had raised this passion to an art form.

  There wasn't an ounce of meat on the bones of the man's career. He had allegedly been at Moscow university before the war, and certainly returned to it afterwards, emerging as an acknowledged expert in the arts and customs of the ancient Scythians, for what that was worth. In between he had been a staff officer in Khalturin's crack division of Chuikov's army, and that in theory brought him to Berlin in 1945. But between the time he had been identified across the public bar of the Bull Inn, Newton Chester, and his appearance at the famous Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, when Kruschev had denounced Stalin, nobody seemed to have set eyes on him. He had been as quiet as Steerforth.

  So someone had been keeping Panin on ice among his Scythian burial mounds, in preparation for the better days between the Twentieth and Twenty-Second congresses. Yet he wasn't one of Kruschev's 'golden boys', like Polyansky: he was everybody's man and nobody's man.

  Moreover he seemed to Audley to have the remarkable talent of knowing unerringly when to be somewhere else.

  He had been as far away from the Kruschev faction in '64 as he had been from the doomed followers of Malenkov and Molotov in '57. Even the single relationship which tied him in with the intelligence agencies was equivocal, through the last hypothetical co-ordinator of the KGB and the GRU, Mironov.

  But Mironov was a Brezhnev appointment, and he had no links with Brezhnev. And when Mironov flew so mysteriously into a Yugoslav hillside four days after the fall of Kruschev, Panin was visiting a dig in the far-off Altai mountains.

  Intelligent anticipation or inside intelligence? The file didn't say, and the bare facts wouldn't tell–and the facts about Panin always seemed to be weeks or months out of date when they finally filtered through.

  Even Audley's own Middle Eastern knowledge was made useless by Panin's shrewd uninvolvement with unprofitable causes. If he had been in the ranks of the Shelepin-Semichastny followers during Kruschev's defeat, he had been conspicuously absent from them when Kosygin clipped their wings during the June War-Glasboro period.

  But a Kosygin man would surely not be on such friendly terms with Grechko, the bully of the East Germans and the Czechs … except that any friend of Grechko ought not to be a friend of Moskalenko …

  It was no use, no bloody use at all. The names and the convolutions of power swam before Audley's eyes. In the Middle East the protagonists were like old friends, whose reactions were at least partially predictable. But here he was among blank-faced technocrats and strangers, of whom Panin was the strangest of all. It would take months of study before any of them would start to talk to him through their comings and goings, absences and appearances, and in the oracular reports of their words and deeds.

  He had to find a short cut to the man's character, or at the very least, to his motivation in 1945.

  Suddenly he realised that his line of thought had been interrupted. Mrs Clark's geese, the guards of his privacy, had been disturbed; they were shrieking their displeasure at a car which was nosing its way up the track towards the house. He could see its headlights flashing intermittently between the overgrown hedgerows.

  Courting couples occasionally tried the lane, which didn't look as if it was going anywhere when it left the main road. But nowadays the geese always intercepted them and drove them back. Yet this driver was not deterred; the headlights halted for two or three seconds near the glow of Mrs Clark's cottage, but then moved forward again. It could only be coming to him now, thought Audley savagely, and it couldn't be a friend, since no friend of his would ever come calling casually.

  The car finally emerged from the lane on to the broad expanse of cobbles, swinging round to stop precisely in front of the porch. It was a white Mini, a tiny toy of a car — nobody he knew drove such an object. But the driver seemed in no hurry to get out, and Audley dared to hope that the engine would start up again. Then the door opened and a tall
, tweedy woman in glasses and headscarf climbed out.

  Audley was halfway down the stairs to the front door before the bell clanged. If it was charity he would buy it off as quickly as possible, and if white elephants were required for some village occasion he would promise a whole herd of them.

  He hardly ever used the main door, and was embarrassed to find that Mrs Clark, ever burglar-conscious, had shot both the huge iron bolts. And when he swung the heavy door open there was an agonised protest of ancient hinges which made him smile: it was altogether too like the opening sequence of a Hammer film, with himself as the ghoulish butler. The coming plea for Oxfam or jumble would be an anticlimax.

  But his caller made no plea. She stood waiting in the pool of light, obviously expecting him to speak first.

  'Can I help you?' he volunteered at last.

  Now she was surprised, and it dawned on Audley that she knew him and had assumed that he knew her. For a long moment he groped for her face in his memory, without success. Somebody's wife? Somebody's sister? Somebody's—

  'Dr Audley, don't you remember that we met this morning. Faith Jones–Faith Steerforth?'

  He made the identification as she spoke. Somebody's daughter! It was unpardonable, but her unexpected glasses and the shadows thrown by the harsh overhead light had deceived him.

  For another long moment he stared at her, at a complete loss for words.

  'Aren't you at least going to ask me in?'

  The 'at least' was like a gauntlet thrown down before him.

  It assumed hostility and carried the fight into the enemy's territory. But how could she have become hostile to him so quickly?

  'Miss Steerforth–Miss Jones,' he apologised. 'Forgive me. Please come in.'

  He motioned her through the hall, down the passage and into the sitting room. She looked around her with unashamed curiosity, as though valuing the place.

  'You've got a lovely house, Dr Audley. And lovely furniture. I didn't know policemen were so well paid,' she said aggressively.

  That flecked him on the raw. He thought of the long struggle to preserve these things that he loved so much, and of the things that had gone to save the rest.

  'This house, or what's left of it, has been in my family for a long time, Miss Steerforth. Or is it Miss Jones?' He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, and achieved a sneer instead.

  'I call myself Jones, Dr Audley. But you can call.me Steerforth if you prefer. That's the name on my birth certificate.'

  She took off her glasses and regarded him with the same disconcerting haughtiness he had felt outside the churchyard at Asham, doubly disconcerting now because the to-hell-with-you look which characterised the surviving pictures of her father was even more pronounced. Except now it was tinged with hostility rather than boredom. Only something her mother or step-father had told her could have roused her like this. And only the card he had given to Jones could have enabled her to track him down. But that didn't ring true of Jones–it was puzzling.

  He realised suddenly that he was out-staring her out of sheer surprise and curiosity. There was uncertainty just beneath the arrogance, and it would be prudent to give that uncertainty time to grow.

  'I was just about to have a drink, Miss–Jones.' He moved to the door without giving her a chance to refuse. 'I'll get you one too.'

  It was only when he had reached the kitchen that he remembered he didn't have a casual female drink in the house any more. He could hardly offer her a choice of beer or brandy, which left only too-good Claret or execrable Spanish burgundy. He searched for the burgundy abstractedly. Why the hell had she come to disturb him? And why did she think he was a policeman? Not that those answers were of any importance, since she could know nothing about the father she had never met.

  He fumed as he pulled the cork. He had lost his confidence with young women; since his break-up with Liz he had been like the pilot who hadn't dared to go up again immediately after the crash. The sooner this nuisance of a girl was packed off, the better.

  But the nuisance looked so woebegone and vulnerable when he returned to her that his determination weakened. She had put on her glasses again, but it seemed that her supply of courage had run out: the strange old house and the strange policeman had begun to overawe her.

  He set a glass on the table beside her. 'Now, Miss Jones, what's the trouble?' Confident neutrality was the note to strike. 'But I must tell you straight away that I'm not a policeman. I think you've been misinformed there.'

  She looked down at her feet.

  'I think–I think maybe I've made a fool of myself,' she said slowly.

  Audley relaxed. It wasn't going to be so embarrassing after all. So long as she didn't start to weep, anyway; anger was preferable to tears any day.

  'I've driven all the way from Asham making up things to say to you. But now I'm here they all seem rather stupid and melodramatic. I don't know what to say now.'

  Audley gestured towards the wine. 'Drink your drink–it isn't very good, I'm afraid. Then let's hear some of the things you made up and I'll tell you if they fit.'

  'They don't fit–I can see that now. But my father–my step-father, that is–said you were a sort of high-up policeman.'

  'Your step-father told you that?' It still didn't sound like Jones.

  Faith Jones shook her head in embarrassment.

  'No, he didn't. That's what makes it worse. I overheard him talking to Mummy. Not deliberately–I'm not an eavesdropper. I was in our spare room, and you can hear every word that's said in the dining room underneath. And I wouldn't have listened, except that I heard my father's name–my real father's name.' She paused. 'It was rather a shock. I just couldn't stop listening.'

  'Why was it a shock? You must have heard them talk about him before. You must have asked them about him.'

  'They've told me lots about him. Grandmother talks about him all the time, even now. But—'

  And it came tumbling out. The brave pilot, hero of the Arnhem drop, with a medal to prove it. Jones had been a little more guarded, or more honest, and had admitted that he hadn't really known her father. But even he had stretched a point and pretended that he believed Steerforth had stayed with the Dakota to save other people's lives. And the little girl had thought herself lucky to have two gallant pilot fathers instead of one, and had never missed the one already in heaven.

  And then she had grown up and strayed into the wrong room, and overheard a conversation with a very different flavour.

  'It was Mummy who started it. She always sees through people. She said: "That man asked you about Johnnie, didn't he?" And Daddy didn't want to answer at first, but she insisted. She said she had a right to know.

  'And then finally he said: "The bastard was up to something big," or something like that. And he said he'd always suspected that he'd been up to no good, but it must have been even more important than he thought, because you were here asking questions.

  'And Mummy asked who you were, and he said you were obviously a special sort of high-up policeman. He said you put on a good act pretending that you were doing a boring job you didn't enjoy. But underneath he thought you were hard as nails–he said you were a mailed fist in a velvet glove.'

  God bless my soul! thought Audley. Jones had seen clear through him, and then had drawn the wrong conclusion because it was the logical one. How many others had made the same mistake, he wondered, from Fred downwards? It was amusing–it was even rather satisfying. But it was ridiculously wide of the mark, and this young woman had presumably seen more clearly, with less reason and more intuition.

  He leaned forward and filled her glass again.

  'No mailed fist. Just an ordinary hand in the glove, Miss Jones. What happened then?'

  'Then it was awful, because Mummy said: "So it's all happening again." And Daddy wanted to know what was happening again. Then she started to cry–and she never cries, or almost never.'

  Her voice faltered, and Audley was terrified for a moment that she was going to fo
llow her mother's lead. But she bore up, and continued.

  'She said that after he'd disappeared two of his crew had kept coming round asking about him as though he were alive. And then they'd asked her if he'd left any messages or instructions. They wouldn't leave her alone.

  'Daddy was nice to her then, and said she ought to have told him. And she said he was the only one who didn't pester her with questions.'

  That was one good thing, thought Audley. It put Jones in the clear beyond all doubt. If he hadn't put the key questions in so many years he certainly hadn't been looking for any answers.

  'And what happened then?'

  'Daddy said she didn't have to worry. He said he'd make damn sure no one pestered her again. If they did he'd get in touch with you–he'd put your address in the book.'

  'So you went and looked me up.'

  Faith Jones nodded.

  'But why come and see me now?'

  The corners of her mouth turned downwards appealingly. For a moment he could see the little girl with the two brave fathers who had suddenly and cruelly discovered that one might have feet of clay.

  'I realise it was silly now. I was so mixed up–but I wanted to come and tell you, or ask you, not to bother them any more. Because they really didn't know anything about –about whatever it was he did.

  'And, Dr Audley, I want to know what he did that was so awful. I mean, I ought to be told, oughtn't I?'

  She looked at him as if she was screwing up her courage to say something awkward.

  'When I was at college no one was ever interested in the war. We were all CND–I went on the marches. But though I've never admitted it I've always been terribly proud of my real father. When I was browsing through Blackwell's in Oxford years ago I saw a book all about his aeroplane. I bought it and I read it. It wasn't very interesting, but I read it. I — I know a lot about Dakotas.

  'And now I've learnt that he wasn't very nice at all–because if my step-father says he was a bastard, I'm sure he was. Daddy doesn't often make mistakes about people.'

  Audley forebore to point out that Daddy–her switching between fathers was confusing–had not been so right about the mailed fist. But she'd made her point, and he would have to produce some sort of answer out of common decency. Except that Steerforth was in some degree a classified subject.