Colonel Butler's Wolf Read Free Page B

suggestion of irrascibility, and civilians accepted it as the natural order of things, not a defense. A uniform meant orders from above and blind obedience, too, and British civilians of the middle and upper classes found this comforting because they took the supremacy of the civil power over the military for granted. It was a long time since Cromwell and his major-generals after all!
    But better so, he reflected, mourning the mothballed khaki —doubly better so. Better that civilians should patronise the uniform—despise it if they chose to—than worship it or fear it as they did in less fortunate lands over the water. If this was the very last service the British Army did for its country, it would be a mighty victory.
    He squared his shoulders at the thought.
    “Don’t equivocate with me, Major Butler,” said Dingle severely. “Is Smith dead?”
    Butler gave a military-sounding grunt. A few moments before the old man had been almost on his side, but he was slipping out of reach again now. The wrong word would ruin everything.
    He gestured to the photographs on the table. “You are forgetting your own experience, sir—“
    “I’m an old man now, Butler. To forget some things is one of the privileges of old age. And I’m remembering that I have a responsibility to my old pupils. Before I remember any more about Smith you must set my mind at rest.”
    “I can’t do that for you, sir,” Butler shook his head.
    “Can’t—or won’t?”
    “Can’t.” Butler’s eyes settled on the big leather Bible on the shelf beside Dingle’s left hand. “Remember the centurion in St Matthew—‘I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth’.”
    “Under whose authority are you, Major?”
    “Under Her Majesty’s Government, Mr Dingle, as we all are. But you miss my point. I’m not the centurion—I’m just the soldier he gave the order to.”
    Dingle’s lips, the double line of skin which served for lips, compressed primly and then relaxed. “Very well, Major. But there’s little I can tell you about him. What I can do is to tell you where to look.”

III
    EXCEPT FOR A pedestrian fifty yards ahead of him and an empty van parked at the far end of it, the road was empty. Butler counted off the lamp-posts until he came to the fourth, dawdled for a moment or two playing with his shoelace to let the fellow turn the corner, and then ducked smartly into the evergreen shrubbery.
    Beyond the outer wall of leaves he stopped to take his bearings. It was quiet and gloomy, and the light was green-filtered through the canopy above him, but it was the right place beyond doubt—he could see the path beaten in the leaf-mould at his feet. He followed it noiselessly, twisting and turning through the thicket of almost naked branches, until he saw the garden wall ahead of him.
    It was, as Dingle had said, an incomparable piece of bricklaying: a craftsman’s wall, as straight and solid as the day it had been built out of the fortune old Admiral Eden had picked up in prize money back in Nelson’s time.
    “ … to keep the locals out—Eden never trusted the lower orders after the Spithead mutiny. And that was what attracted the first headmaster when the house became a school back in ‘28; only he was more concerned with keeping boys in of course … “
    Butler ran his eye along the wall. It was all of ten feet high and crowned with a line of vicious iron spikes which reminded Butler of the chevaux de frise barricades of spiked wood he had seen round the government villages in Vietnam four years before. Again, Dingle had been quite right: it seemed un-climbable without artificial aids.
    “ … Except such a barrier only serves as a challenge to a particular sub-species of boy. It only looks unclimbable: in reality I believe there are three recognised points of egress and at least two well-used entrances … “
    He followed the track along the foot of the wall until he reached the