Authors: Anthony Price
‘What does that mean—yes or no?’
‘It means … hold on to your seat-belt, Frances dear. We are about to be flagged down by the Police—‘ Paul gave her a quick reassuring smile as he decelerated and began to pull across the lanes towards the hard shoulder ‘—but nothing to worry about.’
The car crunched on loose gravel. The silence inside it was suddenly unnerving, punctuated as it was by the intermittent roar and shock-wave of passing lorries labouring their way to the industrial north. Frances watched the sleek police car pull in just ahead of them, a Rover identical to their own except that it was white and ornamented with a dashing blue-red-blue stripe along its flank.
A tall young constable got out cautiously and came back to them. Paul wound down his window and fumbled inside his jacket.
The policeman bent down and peered in at them. Frances saw his eyes widen and was instantly aware that Marilyn’s split skirt had divided to an indecent level.
‘Paul Mitchell,’ said Paul, opening his identification folder. ‘And I’m in an official hurry. Please check with your superiors as quickly as you can.’
The young policeman’s eyes glazed over with the effort of not looking at what they were looking at, and then switched to Paul’s identification.
‘Mr Mitchell—yes, sir.’ The young policeman swallowed bravely. ‘We have been informed about you—‘
A derisive hoot cut him off: the Jaguar they had elbowed out of the road flashed by triumphantly.
‘If you would be so good as to follow us, we’ll clear the way for you, sir. There’s a hold-up about six miles ahead … we’ll get you past it.’
‘Thank you very much, officer.’ Paul’s politeness to the Civil Power was impeccably according to the regulations. ‘We’ve a scheduled stop just beyond Wetherby, at the Crossways Motel. We shall be there for fifteen minutes. If you can give us ten miles after that it will be sufficient, thank you.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The policeman saluted. ‘Just follow us.’
Paul turned to Frances. ‘Well, at least the system is working now. I was supposed to be cleared all the way down, but I nearly got arrested for reckless driving instead.’ He glanced down. ‘And if I’d had you with me I probably
would
have been arrested—the view isn’t conducive to careful driving. Not that it isn’t enchanting also … though I thought suspender belts were strictly for the kinky trade.’
‘Keep your eyes on the road.’
‘Pull your skirt together and I’ll try to.’
Frances draped her plastic raincoat across her knees. ‘You said “yes and no”.’
‘Eh?’
‘The top name on the list.’
‘Oh, yes … in Yorkshire. Well, it isn’t normally, but it is today.’
‘Is where?’
‘At the University of North Yorkshire, for the conferring of honorary degrees and the opening of the new English Faculty Library.’
‘You mean … he’s receiving a degree?’
‘That’s right. A Doctorate of Civil Law, to be exact. For trying to make peace in Ireland, a doctorate in England … and a death sentence in Ireland. He shouldn’t have tried so hard.’
‘The Minister?’
‘Ex-minister … no, the Minister, that’s right. It’s the ex-minister who’s conferring the degree—he’s the Chancellor of the University now. He tried hard too, so he’s also on the list. A damned unforgiving lot, the IFF, putting him on the list is purely vindictive if you ask me. And the IRA’s not much better—I can’t help thinking that they leaked this to us in the first place just to screw us up in knots.’ Paul shook his head. ‘Which, of course, is what it’s doing.’
He shook his head again, and Frances observed him with a mounting sense of disquiet. This wasn’t the cool analysis that accompanied proper security, it was more like an acceptance of the inevitable, the sort of fatalism she imagined soldiers in the very front line must have on the eve of an enemy offensive.
But if that was so then the doubling of the targets didn’t make sense.
‘But Paul—d’you mean to say we’ve let two people on the list get together in the same place?’
‘Three, actually.’
‘
Three?
’
Frances heard her voice rise. ‘You’re joking!’
‘No.’ Paul appeared to concentrate on the police car ahead. ‘The Lord-Lieutenant will be there, and he was General Officer Commanding in Ulster a few years back. Now he’s one of the top advisers to the Minister’s opposite number on the shadow cabinet—which puts him right at the head of the list, alongside the Minister himself in fact. Because he’s a smart fellow.’
Frances found herself staring in the same direction, at the flashing hazard lights of the police car, as they overtook a clot of traffic which had formed behind two juggernaut lorries racing each other up the motorway. With Michael O’Leary on the loose it was nothing short of insanity to assemble three prime targets on one spot; or, at least, on one spot away from the maximum security zone of Westminster and Whitehall where such assemblies were acceptable.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Paul.
But Frances was by no means sure what she was thinking. There was obviously some sort of emergency, no matter what Paul had said to the contrary. It was difficult not to jump to the conclusion that it was directly related to the insanity—the irresistible bait which some fool had dangled in front of O’Leary. Perhaps they were panicking now because they’d only just realised what they’d done.
‘Huh!’ She simulated contempt. If Paul thought he knew what she was thinking she had to encourage him to think aloud.
He gave a quick nod. ‘That’s the way I feel, exactly. But then I thought—North Atlantic, ‘43-‘44—U-boats versus escorts—same problem, same answer.’
‘North Atlantic—?’ Frances caught herself just in time. Not so very long before Paul Mitchell had been a budding young military historian, and one hangover from that lost career was his irritating habit of trying to reduce every situation to some obscure military analogy which could then be solved by the application of Clauswitz or Liddell-Heart. But this time, instead of deriding his theories, she could use them to establish what was really going on.
‘I don’t see how the North Atlantic comes into things, Paul. Enlighten me.’
‘It’s simple. The Atlantic is very big and a U-boat is very small.’
‘And it spends most of its time underwater anyway.’
He looked at her quickly. ‘You’ve got the point?’ He sounded a little disappointed.
‘No. But I thought that was how submarines behaved. Go on.’
‘An …’ He brightened. ‘So of course they’re awfully difficult to find, unless you’re lucky.’
‘I thought we had radar for that.’
‘Don’t complicate matters. That isn’t the point.’
‘Sorry.’ Frances curbed her impatience.
‘The point is that you don’t have to find a submarine. Because if it’s any good it’s going to find you—you being a convoy.’ Again he glanced at her quickly. ‘And don’t start telling me it’s the convoy’s job to avoid the U-boat, I know that. I’m simplifying things, that’s all.’ He turned back to the road. ‘There’s no avoiding O’Leary, anyway.’
‘I see. So O’Leary’s a U-boat, and we’re the convoy escorts—and we just sit around and wait for him to turn up?’ Frances frowned at the banality of the image. ‘That doesn’t seem very profound, either as a metaphor or as a piece of naval tactics.’
‘Uh-huh? Well, that’s where you’re wrong … In fact, it’s a typical armchair critic’s mistake. Everything’s simple when you know how to do it.’
His patronising tone galled Frances. ‘Well, I don’t pretend to be an expert on naval tactics, Paul.’
‘You don’t have to be. It’s just elementary geometry: double the size of the convoy and you don’t double its circumference—it took the admiralty years to discover that allegedly simple fact.’
‘So what?’
He gave her a pitying look. ‘So you haven’t actually doubled the size of the target.
But you have doubled the number of escorts… We’ve trebled the target on the university campus this afternoon—but as they’re in the same place we can concentrate three times as many counter-terrorism experts in the same place. The mathematics are more favourable for guarding human beings than they are for ships, so we can put more than half our people on the look-out for O’Leary. They’re the equivalent of what the Navy used to call “hunter-killer groups” attached to the convoys—so instead of just guarding the bloody targets for once we’ve actually got the manpower to hunt the bastard as soon as he comes in range.’
‘Always supposing that he chooses to oblige you by turning up.
This time it was a half-grin.
‘Oh—he’ s coming right enough.’
Frances started to add up the facts. If Paul was so sure that an attempt was going to be made then there was inside information, and it would probably have come from the IRA itself … And it was undeniably true that there was always a chronic shortage of skilled manpower—and womanpower—because so much of it was needed for protection of high-risk targets that there was always too little left over to do the better job of eliminating the risk; that was the penalty which inflation imposed on internal security and law enforcement alike along with the stresses it inflicted on the mortgage repayments and the groceries bill. So there was a certain logic in the analogy of Paul’s ‘big convoy’ theory, she could see that.
But it was also an appallingly cold-blooded logic, because for all his high-flown naval history in reality they were doing no more than set an old-fashioned domestic mouse-trap, with three human beings as the piece of cheese.
‘You’re deliberately using them for bait, for God’s sake!’
‘Oh no we’re not, Frances dear.’ Paul shook his head decisively. ‘The Chancellor wanted to give the Minister his degree, it wasn’t our idea. And the Minister wanted to come—
and
the Lord-Lieutenant wanted to be there to talk to them both about the latest Government initiative in Ulster. We didn’t set them up.’ He shook his head again. ‘The security hazards were pointed out to them too—in writing. I saw the departmental minute myself.’
There was a lump of ice in Frances’s stomach: that was the absolute give-away, the written warning which the top security bureaucrats issued to protect themselves when they weren’t sure they could protect anyone else. She could protest now until she was blue in the face that the ceremony should have been delayed, if not vetoed altogether, but it wouldn’t do any good. What was more, Paul knew it, and had known it from the start.
This was the moment, ordinarily, when she might have been tempted to a small controlled explosion of anger, which Paul would shrug off as a piece of feminine temperament, male chauvinist pig that he always pretended to be in her presence. But she did not wish to give him that satisfaction; and besides, the lump of ice had a decidedly cooling effect on her responses.
‘I see. So everything in the garden’s lovely.’
‘As much as it ever can be. At least we’ve got enough men and equipment for once, so we won’t fail for lack of resources.’
Resignation again. Basically, Paul Mitchell was quite a cold fish under the boyish charm.
‘And yet I’m required as a reinforcement? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’
He shrugged and grinned. ‘The more, the merrier. Not that Fighting Jack is exactly merry at the moment. In fact, he’s decidedly feisty at the moment, is our Jack.’
‘Colonel Butler’s in charge?’ Frances had never operated under Colonel Butler’s direction, and when she tried to conjure him up in her mind’s eye all she could manage was the memory of two other very blue eyes registering disapproval. Either the Colonel didn’t approve of young women in general, or (since he could hardly disapprove of her personally) he objected to women in this type of work in particular; neither of which conclusions suggested that he would welcome Mrs Fitzgibbon with open arms as a reinforcement.
She realised that Paul had nodded to the question.
‘But he’s not satisfied with things?’ That would be an understatement, I suspect.’
‘What things?’ Frances remembered also that the formidable Dr Audley, who was one of the department’s heavyweights, had a high opinion of Colonel Butler; and a choice between David Audley’s opinion and Paul Mitchell’s was no choice at all.
‘Oh, he doesn’t say—not in front of the hired help. Fighting Jack’s a bit old-fashioned that way. Not quite “Damn your impertinence—do your duty, sir”, but near enough.’
‘He sounds rather admirable. A pleasant change, even,’ said Frances tartly.
Paul thought about the Colonel for a moment. ‘The funny thing is … that he
is
rather admirable in many ways. He’s got all the old pre-1914 virtues, you might say. Like … he’d never pass the buck to anyone else, it wouldn’t even occur to him. And he’ll ball you out to your face, and then defend you behind your back—real officer-and-gentleman stuff.’ He smiled at her. ‘Except I suspect he wasn’t born to it.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, there’s the faintest touch of broad Lancashire under his Sandhurst accent I rather think. Not quite out of the top drawer, is our Jack.’
Frances grimaced at him. ‘I never knew you were a snob, Paul.’
‘I’m not. Nothing wrong with dropping your aitches—Field Marshal Robertson ‘adn’t got a “haitch” in ‘is vocabulary, and ‘e was none the worse for it. It’s the same with Fighting Jack, except that he’s learnt the language better. But he does seem to be playing a part.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ Frances looked down at Marilyn’s platform shoes on her feet. Against all her expectations she’d found them easy to wear. Indeed, when she thought about it, she’d found everything about Marilyn disconcertingly easy, almost disturbingly easy.
‘Oh, I know. “All the world’s a stage” and all that. But just a minute or two back you were disapproving of this university lark of ours, and it’s my belief that Fighting Jack feels the same way. Only the difference is that if he’d got really bolshie about it he might have scuppered the operation.’ Paul kept his eyes on the road ahead, but he was no longer smiling, Frances noted. ‘But he didn’t,’ he concluded grimly. ‘He didn’t.’
This was the true face concealed behind the front line fatalism and the naval tactics, thought Frances. With Colonel Butler playing a 1914 Colonel, Paul had naturally chosen a 1914 subaltern as his model. Yet beneath the role the real Paul didn’t like the situation one bit either.