The Memory Trap (24 page)

Mitchell breathed in deeply. But then controlled himself. ‘David—‘

The rasp in Mitchell’s voice had sounded too much like steel leaving its scabbard. ‘All right, Paul.’ But Audley knew he had to make allowances for what must have been a long night. ‘Major Richardson will be with us, for the time being.’

‘He still needs me, is what Dr Audley means.’ Richardson had evidently recognized the sound too, but was making no such allowance. ‘So you must make the best of it … for the time being. After that … we’ll see, eh?’

‘Yes.’ Mary Franklin took centre-stage diplomatically before Mitchell could accept that challenge. ‘But, in that case, Major, why are we meeting here, and not in London? Is this “the best of it”?’

‘Good question, Miss Franklin. The best—and perhaps the worst.’ The wind ruffled Richardson’s hair again. ‘This is fine country—the borders, the Welsh marches.
My
country, it used to be, I thought … I used to come this way, up from the south, where my regiment was stationed after I left Sir Frederick Clinton’s service—your service, Miss Franklin? No?’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind! I used to come this way to visit friends at Pen-y-ffin up the road, en route to Hereford, when I was cultivating old SAS friends there, to get a transfer to them—‘ he cocked his head at her this time ‘—SAS headquarters being at Hereford, you know? And all this being one of their stamping grounds, where the English and the Welsh used to raid each other in the olden times—

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.

Do you know the poem, Miss Franklin? It gets very bloodthirsty after that. Did you bring General Lukianov’s picture with you, like Dr Audley asked?’

‘Yes.’ But she didn’t move. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘This could be his country too. But I won’t know for sure until I see his picture.’ Richardson put out his hand. ‘Please—?’

She took a stiffened envelope from her shoulder-bag. ‘This is a recent photograph, Major.’

‘Of course.’ The wind fluttered the photograph as he slid it out. ‘I’ll make the same allowances as I do for myself, when I look in the mirror.’

They all waited.

‘Handsome fellow.’ Richardson smoothed the print, holding it with both hands against its envelope. Typical
Spetsnaz
.’

‘Yes?’ Mary Franklin exchanged a glance with Mitchell.

‘Yes. Anglo-Saxon type … or, presumably, Scandinavian or Germanic, from the north-west. Could be one of ours, from much the same stock, way back … the same as I can pass for a foreigner, coming home.’ He held Lukianov at arm’s length. ‘Yes … a much-favoured type for missions in the west, eh David?’ He offered the picture to Audley. ‘You’ve seen this?’

‘Do you remember him, Major?’ Mary intercepted the picture.

‘No. But, then, I didn’t expect to.’ Richardson let go of it. ‘It doesn’t change anything.’

Mitchell sniffed. ‘I didn’t know you were a
Spetsnaz
expert.’

‘No?’ Richardson enjoyed Mitchell’s not-knowing. ‘Not in my file, eh?’

‘Not in your file, no.’ But Mitchell had recovered his poise. ‘Are you?’

‘Not really. But I did do a bit of private study on them while I still had clearance—in the Barnet House records, as well as our own—like David’s profile of General Kharchenko, from the late sixties … ‘

Richardson smiled suddenly.

‘It was when I started to plan for my SAS-transfer later on,
Spetsnaz
and the SAS being mirror-image organizations, in some respects—‘ The smile became lop-sided ‘—except they are about a hundred-times bigger … But Kharchenko was a great SAS-admirer—ask David.’

Then the smile vanished again.

‘I just thought if I had a bit of inside-knowledge about them—
Spetsnaz
… it might have increased my suitability, that’s all, Dr Mitchell. Because I was a bit long-in-the-tooth for a transfer, maybe. But I didn’t much fancy regimental duty—Salisbury Plain, Ireland, Germany … Salisbury Plain, Germany, Ireland. My time with Research and Development had spoilt my taste for playing that sort of soldier, what was left of it originally. Okay?’

He took in Mitchell and Mary Franklin together again.

‘Does that answer your question?’ Then he nodded at Mary Franklin’s handbag. ‘Typical
Spetsnaz
, as I said. Turn his clock back fifteen years and you’ve got another of those clean-cut Russian boys in Afghanistan I’ve been seeing on Italian newsreels, is what I mean. Only he would have worn his hair longer. And no one from here to Hereford would have given him a second glance … except maybe the girls.’

Neither Mitchell nor Mary Franklin looked at each other this time.

‘Okay.’ Richardson accepted their silence. ‘So I’ve come clean on
Spetsnaz
. And I heard David on the ‘phone to you last night, Dr Mitchell. So what have you got for me, then?’

Mitchell didn’t fancy that final arrogant “me” any more than he fancied the man himself. And it was more than a simple chalk-and-cheese, like-but-unlike, post-Capri reaction, Audley realized. More simply still, because of his own past and background Mitchell disliked the sum of Peter Richardson, everything he stood for and everything about him, from his distinguished good-looks to the way in which he’d twice abandoned his military career (never mind an equally promising one in intelligence) when it didn’t please him sufficiently: that last, for Paul Mitchell, would be a betrayal beside which the man’s retirement activities were a mere aberration.

‘For you?’ Mitchell’s lip twisted with distaste.

‘For me.’ Audley pushed the words between them before Mitchell’s irritation got the better of him. ‘Have you traced the policeman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’ Richardson wasn’t interested in Mitchell’s likes and dislikes. ‘Well, seeing as I supplied his name that can’t have taxed you much.’ He lifted his head slightly. ‘He’d be retired by now, of course—eh?’

Mitchell ignored him. ‘Yes. We’ve traced the policeman, David.’

‘He wouldn’t be dead, by any chance?’ Richardson refused to be ignored.

‘He lives with his widowed sister in a village near Hereford, David,’ said Mitchell pointedly. ‘We have arranged for you to talk to him this morning.’

Richardson leaned forward. ‘Did you talk to him, Dr Mitchell—last night?’

‘Yes, Major.’ Mitchell bowed to the urgency in Richardson’s voice. ‘We got him out of his bed at midnight. And we talked to him.’

‘Did you ask him about the spade?’

Mitchell looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got a good half-an-hour’s drive, David. Shall we go?’

‘
Did you ask him about the spade
?’ Richardson refused to be gainsaid.

Audley nodded to Mitchell.

Mitchell stared at him for a moment, then turned to Richardson again. ‘Yes, Major Richardson—we asked him about the spade.’

‘And—?’

A stronger gust of wind swirled over and around them, carrying the word away up the valley.

‘We also checked up on your own little accident, in London. And that was a lot easier. We only had to wake up a succession of irritable civil servants, as well as policemen, and pull rank on them. Plus the Defence of the Realm and the anti-terrorist regulations, and the Third World War.’ Mitchell took his revenge steadily. ‘And we established that you’d had an accident which wasn’t your fault. As a result of which an Irishman named Murphy was fined £15, with £25 costs, after pleading guilty to careless driving. Although his present whereabouts—and the whereabouts of a million other Murphies—‘

‘The devil with my accident, Mitchell!’ At the third try, Richardson got his word in edgeways. ‘What about the spade?’

‘The spade?’ Mitchell decided not to settle for one small victory, even for the time being. ‘That was PC Jenkins, retired. And you know how many Jenkinses there are in Wales—retired and unretired? Even Policemen Jenkinses? “Daft”, they thought I was, at first. And then “bloody daft” when I told them you’d lost a spade fifteen years ago, maybe. But now you wanted it back, and—‘

‘Paul—‘ Audley cut him off sharply ‘—that’s enough. Just tell us about the spade.’

Mitchell looked at him, not so much twitchingly now as tired. And angry with it. ‘Right, David. So … I won’t tell you the rest of it, then—not even when I had to get Henry Jaggard to phone up the Chief Constable? After the Duty Sergeant told me to piss off—?’

Just for a spade
! thought Audley.
With no poor crooked scythe to go with it
—
never mind any hammer-and-sickle. But
…
six men, in two countries, had died because of that spade, maybe. And, but for Jack Butler
’
s
“
error of judgement
”
, and then Colonel Zimin
’
s possible error, he himself might have been one of them, by God
!

‘No.’ There might come a time to make a joke of this, if they outlived this day, and came safe home: Normandy had been like that. But this was neither the time nor the day. ‘Just tell us about the spade.’

‘Okay.’ Mitchell shrugged at him, and then at Richardson. ‘He didn’t remember the bloody spade—not at first … He didn’t even remember
you
, Major—not at first, when we gave him
your
name, no matter that you remembered
his
: he thought we were “daft”, too.’ Against all the odds, Mitchell brightened slightly. ‘But then, in the end, he did remember. Only not because of you, Major. It was the owners of the spade he remembered. Because they were unfinished business—that’s what he called them: “unfinished business”—‘

‘What owners?’ Richardson was calm now, almost ingratiatingly so.

‘The owners.’ Just as suddenly, Mitchell forgot to be angry. ‘The owners of the crashed van you reported—? It was their van … and they’d reclaimed it. And then they came back for their spade—‘ Now he was calm too. ‘Yes—?’

‘Were they the drivers?’ Richardson shook his head. ‘When I came on that van, it was on its side, in the road, with no one in it. And the windscreen was broken—it had hit the bank, and turned over … And there was blood all over the front seats. And … there was the spade there—on the floor—?’

‘So you called the police, like a good citizen.’ Mitchell nodded. ‘But the owners said it was stolen. And the police never found the drivers. But that was what PC Jenkins remembered, eventually: he thought they’d be in the local hospital, cut-and-bruised … or, preferably, worse. Like, detained for observation, with suspected fractures, to make it easy for him. But they weren’t … which he thought was odd. But … the spade wasn’t odd, Major.’

Richardson frowned at him. ‘But I told him to show it to his boss—to find out who it belonged to. I told him what he ought to do, in fact, damn it!’

‘Well, he did find out that.’ Mitchell stared back at him defiantly. “The owners came in to collect it. And he only remembered that because he already knew them: they were a couple of “general dealers” from Abergavenny. Two right old lags he’d known for years … receiving stolen property, plus a bit of sheep-stealing, and all that. And he’d reckoned at first, once he’d traced the ownership of the van, that they’d be the ones who’d turn up black-and-blue—that they’d both been pissed when they crashed the van, and had run off so that they could sober up and establish an alibi … Which they had, of course—had an alibi: they said the van had been nicked from their yard, and they didn’t even know it was gone until the police phoned them up.’ He shrugged again. ‘So there wasn’t anything he could do then. Because they clearly hadn’t been bashed-up in any accident—not on that occasion, anyway.’

‘Not on … that occasion?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Mitchell grinned. “The real reason why he remembers the pair of them was that he
did
get ‘em in the end—for drunk-driving, that is.’ He nodded. ‘It was about eighteen months afterwards. Only this time they ran out of road in a more public place, not on a little back-road. And this time it wasn’t a van they were in—it was a damn great three-year-old Jaguar. Which turned out to be theirs. And that also surprised him, because they had been near-bankrupt for years. But he reckoned they must have pulled off a big burglary somewhere off his patch, probably over in England, and got clean away with it. Which was another reason why he started to remember everything. Because it narked him that they were able to pay the drunk-driving fine so easily, after the magistrates threw the book at them. And not even the five-year driving disqualification hurt them, either. Because they then de-camped off to Spain after that, to the “Costa del Crime” where all the rich villains go. While the poor old honest PC Jenkins himself retired on his police pension to keep house with his sister—‘ Mitchell broke off as he realized that Richardson was no longer listening to him, but was nodding to Audley.

‘That just about wraps it up—eh, David?’

‘The spade—‘ began Mitchell sharply. But then he broke off again as he began to interpret his own story.

‘They were sent to collect it.’ Richardson stared through Audley. “They must have spotted me—
someone
must have spotted me … After all, I was hanging round for about an hour or more, that afternoon … late afternoon, early evening—I was late for dinner with … my friends at Pen-y-ffin.’ He focused on Audley again. ‘Being a good citizen! This is what I get for being a good citizen, David!’ But there was no amusement in the reflection, only bitterness. And then the glazed stare returned. “The Russians couldn’t have known for sure that I’d spotted it. So they had nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain, by sending their two locals to pick it up … But they couldn’t be sure—‘ He stopped as abruptly as Mitchell had done. And then his face became stone as his teeth clamped together. ‘So that wraps it up.’

It did just about wrap it up, thought Audley—and not “just about”, either: the two venal “locals”
(always go for professional petty criminals, that was what the book laid down: they were more easily scared into absolute obedience if you chose them carefully, balancing their relative lack of intelligence against their cost-effective greed and more limited ambition
—
and, most of all, the limits of their curiosity!);
and, indeed, the proof-of-that-pudding was there in this whole sequence of dusty events from long ago, from a minor accident on the Welsh border, via another one in a London street, to the presumed suicide of an elderly and impoverished Italian lady in her heavily-mortgaged
palazzo
on the Amalfi coast. Only, until now, it had been an unconnected sequence. And now that it was connected it looked quite different.
‘
Yes, I suppose it does, Peter. So far, anyway.
’