Read Online For the Good of the State by Anthony Price - Free Book Online Page B

Panin, because Jaggard had indicated that the Russian had arrived unobtrusively, by agreement with the FCO. But R & D had ways of knowing things, Harvey had warned; and it would certainly know all about one Thomas Arkenshaw, Harvey had added nastily: ‘ He probably knows more about you than we know — and maybe more than you’ll find comfortable, old boy! ’
    So what ? thought Tom. considering the grimy seat of the chair. It looked as though it hadn’t been sat on since last summer, and although he might have parked his castle-exploring denims of this morning on it he wasn’t about to mess up the good suit he had packed for tonight’s dinner-with-Willy that would never take place. Instead, he sauntered across the yard—it was more a terrace than a yard, separated from the lawn above it by a low stone wall—until he reached the well, which was completely equipped with a rusty winder and an antique wooden bucket on a chain. Idly, he picked up a small piece of flaked stone from the rim and dropped it in.
    One, two—plop!
    ‘Hullo, there! Arkenshaw, I presume?’
    Tom controlled his involuntary start of guilt at being caught throwing something into another man’s well: there were parts of the world where that rated a bullet in the back. Also, he had somehow expected Audley to come from the direction of the lawn, rather than from behind him.
    A slow innocent turn was required, anyway.
    ‘Good afternoon, Dr Audley.’ “ Big, ugly old devil ‘, Harvey had said off-handedly, and all those adjectives filled David Audley’s bill exactly: in his gardening clothes, which had not seen better days for many years, he resembled nothing so much as an ageing Irish navvy who had done his share of fighting for pounds and pints on the old fairground circuit of his native land. So that makes two of us , thought Tom, who don’t look like themselves ! ’Im sorry to descend on you like this.‘ That was what Jaggard had said to him; only this time it was no lie. ’But you’ve had a phone-call, I gather.‘
    ‘I have.’ Audley advanced across the terrace in his enormous navvy’s gumboots, which looked as though they had steel toe-caps, until he was able to look down on Tom from close quarters from his six-foot four. ‘But I won’t shake your hand.’
    ‘No?’ What confused Tom was that the big man’s intense scrutiny of him was nevertheless not in the least hostile—if anything his expression was as innocently friendly as his battered features allowed. ‘Well, you don’t have to—’ He stopped as Audley’s hands came up, palms upwards.
    ‘I’ve been making a bonfire.’ Audley presented two massive, dirt-encrusted paws. ‘So I’m not really fit for decent company—my wife won’t even let me in her kitchen. She says I’m like “Pig-pen” in Peanuts .’ He grinned a huge grin. ‘Charlie Brown—? She’s a Charlie Brown addict, is my wife.’ He chuckled. ‘I see myself rather as Schroeder, the intellectual one—with her as Lucy, because she packs a mean right hook. But she sees me as “Pig-pen”—we never see ourselves as others see us, do we?’
    Tom struggled against an enveloping sense of unreality. The idea of the willowy, blue-blooded Mrs Audley, pale and fragile, packing any sort of punch … the idea of her in those huge hands, bear-hugged … was incongruous to the point of disbelief. And there was also the unlikely offspring of this unlikely union, and Tripoli too, in the back of his mind.
    But there was another explanation to all this, which was tripping him before he’d started to move: one thing Jaggard and Harvey and rumour were agreed on was that Audley was tricky. So he had to be tricky too!
    ‘Your daughter packs a mean punch too, Dr Audley.’ He grinned back at the man.
    ‘She does?’ Audley hadn’t expected that reply. ‘She does—yes.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Yes. She had me with a reference to “Tripoli”—in relation to George Bernard Shaw and Thomas