Gunner Kelly dda-13

by Anthony Price

  The policeman moved away, leaving the door open, sweeping the bushes with his torch.

  Now it had to be done quickly. It was all clear, and the policeman would have scouted round with his torch to make sure of that, in so far as it was possible. And Blackie Nabb was in the phone-box, and it was unlikely that they’d have more than one guard this far from the village.

  The cylinder was unnaturally heavy—heavy not because of its contents, but because it had to float correctly and unobtrusively, like a water-logged tree-trunk. But he was ready for its weight, and the van’s position—front wheels already in the water, within a metre of the footbridge alongside it—cut the distance he had to move to a minimum. Half a dozen noiseless steps took him into the water, and if he made any splash it was covered by the extra banging the policeman made as he closed up the van. Even before that had finished he had ducked down under the footbridge into the darkness and deeper water downstream, cradling the cylinder in his dummy1

  arms.

  The immediate need was to put distance between himself and the vicinity of the ford, in case Mr Nabb strayed round to the footbridge, for the reflected light from the headlights of the furniture van illuminated the pool that was scoured below the bridge by the flow from off the hard surface of the ford. But the action wasn’t as easy as the thought, for though the water took the weight of the cylinder from him, the thick mud of the river-bed sucked down his feet, holding him back.

  River— R. Addle— River Addle—the map had called the blue line which straggled along the margin of Duntisbury Chase. But a river it was not; perhaps in mid-winter, or when the spring floods rose, it might aspire to that description; but here, even in this deeper pool in the middle of a damp English summer, its mud and water between them could only submerge him to chest-height.

  His feet came free at last, and he was able to push forward, half-swimming, half-walking, in the wake of the cylinder, which had already begun to drift away on the sluggish current.

  At least the distances were miniature, though: a dozen noiseless strokes and trailing branches brushed his head as he reached the exit from the pool; and then, as utter darkness closed around him, he could already see a paler area ahead of him, like the night outside a tunnel, which marked the end of the woods surrounding the ford, and the beginning of the open fields through which the River Addle flowed, with only occasional willow-trees on its banks, until it reached the trees of the Roman villa site on the edge of the village.

  dummy1

  River, indeed! thought Benedikt contemptuously, as his feet sank into another shallow part of the bed of the ‘river’, and one of his hands touched the SAS cylinder, which had snagged on a tree-root

  —

  What am I doing here, encased in a wet-suit, crawling up a muddy English ditch like this towards an English village, for all the world as though I’m penetrating a high-risk Comecon installation, somewhere east of the line? It’s ridiculous!

  He pushed the cylinder aside and waded out into the open, beyond the last straggle of undergrowth. An image of the air photograph Colonel Butler had shown him reproduced itself in his brain: from this point he had perhaps a mile of river to negotiate, little more, along the valley bottom, although the road he had travelled a few hours before—the rolling English drunkard’s road—had meandered for twice that distance.

  What am I doing here?

  Herzner’s voice answered him: Whatever it is he wants you to do, within reason— do it. This has the smell of one of their domestic scandals, so it may be tricky . . . But Colonel Butler is a man of honour, as well as influence in high places. If we assist him he will not forget it . . .And Audley . . . Audley will either go to the very top or into the outer darkness— perhaps Audley and Butler together . . . one more Intelligence failure over here, and they are well-placed to pick up the pieces and take over. So you are in the nature of an investment, Schneider— a professional and political investment—

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  Benedikt did not much like being an investment, the more so if there were politics involved, and most of all when someone as equivocal as Dr David Audley was involved in them. It would be better—or, at least, it would be simpler—to see himself as a loyal ally of an ancient comrade-in-arms ... in the mud of the Addle stream now, but once in the mud of the Lasne, where the road to the field of Waterloo crossed it, straining to get von Billow’s guns across to save Wellington’s army, with old Blücher’s challenge in his ears: Come on, lads! Would you have me break my word!

  Treading mud, he could see just above the banks of the Addle, across the fields on each side.

  Well, at least there was one thing he could do, which had nothing to do with being a loyal ally, even: he could see— literally see—

  how good the British image intensifiers were, courtesy of the SAS, as supplied to the Falklands reconnaissance groups!

  Well . . . they were good—they were really quite good, and almost as good as those on which he had trained—

  Good enough, anyway, to observe the herd of cows munching peacefully far away across the field to his right . . . and no hazards or obstacles in prospect except those designed to give the fox-hunters good practice, with not one yard of barbed-wire, which the riders hated as much as any infantryman.

  He pushed forward, keeping to the deepest centre of the stream, where he could almost swim. After a few strokes, the cord on his wrist tugged at his stroke, but a second tug freed the cylinder—that was how the plastic branches were designed: to look real, but to bend and give way as soon as extra pressure was exerted on them, dummy1

  to allow the ersatz tree-trunk to follow its master—

  It was easy. With the weak current behind him, and the water holding him up and taking the weight of the cylinder, he could make something like walking pace, with his head below the bank.

  At intervals, he stood up—always between the clumps of willows to which any inexperienced sentry would inevitably gravitate—but each sweep identified only animals . . . first cows, which took no notice of him, and later sheep, which bleated weakly and uneasily, as though they couldn’t quite remember the nights when the wolves had hunted their remote ancestors, but nevertheless hadn’t lost some dim frightening memory of long-extinct enemies, from which their loving guardians, the good shepherds, protected them all the way to the slaughter-house. But their warning protests were quickly silenced when he sank down into the stream and let himself drift by their wallows, careful only not to sample any of the fouled water.

  The River Addle—

  Addled eggs his English vocabulary had given him, but Mother’s dictionary had warningly added the definition of addle as ‘stinking urine or liquid filth’; which he could believe now, after having traversed several trampled-down gaps in the Addle’s banks where its fauna drank and defecated, so that he didn’t even like to wipe his sweaty face with Addle-water, let alone quench his thirst with it.

  But it was easy. If there were night-guards out in Duntisbury Chase, they were not here, along the Addle—Colonel Butler had calculated correctly. . . . Maybe there were no such guards —

  maybe they had imagined the whole thing, between them, and this dummy1

  was all for nothing; the only obstacles to his passage were the wires stretched across the stream at field boundaries—not barbed-wires of course (not barbed-wire in the Chase!), but inoffensive strands under which he could duck with no fear of snagging himself even if he had touched them—

  It was easy—

  And now the wolf—or this fox, anyway—was almost within the fold— this fold—on the edge of the belt of trees which marked the beginning of the Roman villa-site on the outskirts of Duntisbury Royal itself, where he planned to come ashore.

  It was easy—

  He caught hold of a tree-root eroded out of the bank with his free hand, and jerked the cord which attached him to the cylinder trailing five metres behind him. This was the ideal landfall. Then, suddenly, it was not so easy!

  The bright re
d tip of a cigarette flared briefly, like a fire-fly in the dark, downstream not twenty metres from him, freezing him into immobility in that instant, with half his body out of the water.

  The flare died down, then disappeared altogether—there was the thick trunk of an old willow-tree curving out over the stream where it had disappeared—then the fire-fly flew in an arc, out over and into the stream, to be instantly extinguished. Not easy—but too easy: now it was his own undeserved good luck which froze him, congealing the sweat on his face as he sank back noiselessly into the stream, crouching down in it.

  He had been foolish; he had not accorded Colonel Butler his dummy1

  absolute confidence—and, even worse, not backing his own judgement of Duntisbury Chase, because it had seemed to him over-imaginative: Audley’s not trained to set up anything like this . . . But don’t underrate him for that reason: if there is anything there, waiting for you, it’ll be maybe amateurish . . . But, if he has anything to do with it, it won’t be predictably amateurish.

  So we’ll take precautions—

  He swore silently under his breath, easing himself closer to a tall growth of water-weeds on the edge of the stream. The damnable truth was that this was both predictable and amateurish, and he had still nearly been caught by it: predictable, because the air photos had shown a narrow footbridge across the Addle not far downstream from here, so that this was where he ought to have expected a hazard . . . and amateurish . . . God! If Audley hadn’t had to make do with an unskilled sentry who smoked on guard-duty he himself would be in no position now to criticise that!

  Just in time, he remembered the ersatz tree-trunk— Or not just in time—it was already floating past him downstream, fatally out of reach, and the slimy cord eluded his grip long enough to make it behave—damn it, almost level with the sentry!—as no ordinary drifting log ought to behave. He would have to let the line play out

  —

  “Dad!”

  The unexpected sound caught him with his senses at full stretch: dry mouth, although it wasn’t a Kalashnikov waiting for him in the dark—could the cigarette-smoker see the log?— and the sweet-rotten smell of the stream, of growing and summer-flowering dummy1

  things, and dead things, and wet mud in his nostrils, and all the small night sounds of the countryside in his ears.

  “Dad?”

  This time it was a much louder whisper, urgent inquiry edged with apprehension.

  “Ssssh! Over here, boy!”

  The soft crunch-and-swish marked the movement of the boy towards the man through the river-bank vegetation.

  “Ouch!”

  “Ssssh!”

  “I stung meself, Dad. Dad—”

  “What you doin‘ ’ere? Does your Mum know—?” The sentry began accusingly, cutting off the boy with his first question angrily, then amending his anger with doubt in the second question.

  “Yes, Dad. She said for me to come.”

  Benedikt recognised the speaker. But of course—if it was anyone, it would be he!

  “She—what?”

  “She said I could come. She didn’t send me. Mr Kelly sent me—

  she said I could come, though—”

  Kelly!

  “Kelly?”

  Mr Kelly sent me! With those four words the greater part of his mission was accomplished: Kelly was in Duntisbury Chase.

  dummy1

  “The police are in the village, Dad,” Benje came to the point breathlessly.

  “What?”

  “The police, Dad. Mr Russell an‘ another one—an inspector, Mr Kelly told Mum . . . They went to the Bells.”

  Benedikt began to play out the line, to let the log drift past the point of danger.

  “The Bells?” The father didn’t sound as intelligent as the son.

  “It’s okay—they didn’t catch ‘em. The till was open an’ the door locked . . . But Mr Kelly says for me to tell you to stay here

  —‘cause Old Joapey can’t come yet, because he was in the Bells when the police came—”

  The line tautened to full stretch. The log must be well beyond Dad by now, and there would never be a better moment to follow it, while the man was digesting this news of the police raid.

  “Mr Kelly got out the back though—” continued Benje “—an‘ he came straight to Mum—”

  Benedikt took a deep breath and sank into the water. It was hardly a metre deep, and he was forced to propel himself downstream like some blind and primitive amphibious creature, half swimming and half crawling: it was like nothing he had ever done before, but the need for absolute silence made further analysis impossible. All he could do was to count his strokes, allowing for the fact that some of them were hardly strokes at all, when his fingers sank into the mud or encountered harder objects—all the waterlogged and sunken detritus from the world outside and above the stream . . .

  dummy1

  fallen branches and tangled lumps of river-weed roots and the submerged stems of the reeds.

  He counted almost to the limit before anchoring one hand in a tangle and letting himself surface, pulling sideways on his anchor as he did so, so that he came up close alongside the reeds and away from open water.

  For a moment he could hear nothing. Then the soft murmur of voices came through. He had not travelled very far by the sound of them . . . not much further downstream from Dad than he had been upstream of the man before he had started. But the reeds were protectively tall, and the continuing murmur reassured him that his passage had gone unnoticed.

  For another moment he was torn between the temptation to stay where he was, to listen to whatever father and son had to say to each other, or to put more distance between himself and them while he had the best chance. But the temptation to stay was a weak one: the boy’s job would have been simply to have warned his father to stay on guard, or out of the village, because his relief

  —‘Old Joapey’, presumably—was otherwise engaged. It was unlikely that Kelly ... or, more likely, Audley himself . . . would have confided more to a mere child, however intelligent.

  Audley . . . or Kelly ... or both: that was the second and last part of what Colonel Butler wanted to know. And the best way to that was to move now, while he had the opportunity, while the presence of the police would inhibit movement within the village.

  He pushed out into the stream again, keeping as close to the reeds as possible, without bothering to use the image intensifier. Either dummy1

  the night was less dark now or his own night sight had improved: the loom of the footbridge ahead quickly became the bridge itself, a low structure similar to that beside the ford which he had already negotiated. Beyond it the trees thickened on both sides of the stream and the sun-loving reeds ended. The sky above him became patches of blue-black against a tracery of interlocking branches as he approached the planned landfall.

  Everything was all right now: he was in the right place at just about the right time. He had been careless, but he had also been lucky, and the one cancelled out the other to leave him feeling slightly ridiculous. This was England, not the Other Side—and this was the altogether ridiculous River Addle, a tributary of the negligible River Avon (which was confusingly just one of the many English River Avons), not of the Elbe or the Oder or the Danube or the Vistula . . . And that had been Benje’s Dad smoking on the bank back there, not some double-trusted Communist border guard armed with the latest lethal technology and keen to try it out on anyone crossing his line from either side of it.

  Ridiculous indeed!

  There was an area of not-quite-darkness just ahead, beneath a break in the canopy of leaves, where the spring floods had undercut the bank to create an overhang. That would be a good place to moor the log after he had swopped the wet-suit for its contents, where if it was seen it would be thought to have snagged itself naturally among the exposed tree-roots.

  He hauled in the line, bringing the log to his landing place, and eased himself silently on to the bank. For a moment nothing dummy
1

  stirred, then suddenly a bird squawked in panic just above his head and flapped noisily from its roost, away down the course of the stream, to find some safer refuge.

  He hugged the ground, waiting for silence to gather round him again, listening to it thicken until all he could hear came from far away: among the distant night noises he could even distinguish the faint hum of a vehicle on the main road on the ridge, two or three kilometres in a straight line across country from the valley.

  Perhaps not quite ridiculous: perhaps practice of a sort . . . or, if not practice, at least a reminder of the risks and discomforts which his successors in the field must endure on his orders—successors who could not depend on luck cancelling carelessness.

  Well ... the silence around him was absolute again, and the fox was in the fold undetected, with a job to do ... so whether that job was ridiculous, or a little gentle practice, or a timely reminder of harsher realities ... all of that hardly mattered.

  He sighed, and lifted the log out of the water on to dry land, feeling along it in the dark for the concealed catches which opened it.

  Out of the wet-suit, and dry, and properly dressed again like an innocent tourist—an innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer—he felt much better.

  Of course, he was still an intruder, and if challenged and identified he had only his story of an evening walk on the downland which had been overtaken by darkness and had ended with his becoming hopelessly lost. Even as he rehearsed it to himself while crossing dummy1

  the Roman villa field from the stream, it sounded thin and unconvincing to him. But what could they do but believe him?

  And, anyway, thin and unconvincing or not, it was better than being caught in a wet-suit: a stranger in slightly crumpled slacks and wind-cheater might or might not be up to no good. But a stranger abroad in a wet-suit after dark could only be either a lunatic or a villain.

  But . . . beneath what could they do? that other question still plagued him, as it plagued Colonel Butler: What was Audley doing?

  It was extraordinary that the inhabitants of a peaceful English village should conspire together to revenge themselves on a terrorist. And yet, supposing that they had found some way of luring the killer to them, it was not unbelievable.