Other Paths to Glory Read Free

like to know what you are doing - and who you are, come to that.’
    Audley considered him equably.
    ‘Let’s say I’m just someone with a piece of German trench map, that’s all.’
    He nodded and turned away, leaving Mitchell no alternative but to ask the same question of the red-haired colonel, who as yet showed no sign of following him. Yet before he could re-formulate the question Butler himself spoke, gesturing to the maps and papers on the table.
    ‘What makes anyone want to write about - all this - nowadays?’
    ‘Anyone?’
    ‘You then.’
    Coming from Butler it seemed a strange question, and he hardly knew how to handle it.
    ‘Curiosity, maybe.’
    ‘Curiosity? You mean morbid curiosity?’
    ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’
    Butler frowned at him.
    ‘We lost sixty thousand men on the first day of the Somme … But of course - you’re not interested in the Somme, I remember. So what are you interested in?’
    ‘The Hindenburg Line.’
    ‘Why that?’
    ‘My grandfather was killed breaking through it, near Bellenglise on the St Quentin Canal. He commanded the 1st/6th West Mercians.’
    Butler looked at him for a moment.
    ‘This professor of yours, Emerson - where would he be at the moment?’
    The abrupt change in questioning wrong-footed Mitchell. ‘Why do you want to know?’
    ‘You say he’s the expert on the Somme. And you say you aren’t.’ Butler’s voice was expressionless. ‘Is he at home?’
    The man was as bad as Audley.
    ‘You tell me why it’s so all-fired important and I’ll tell you where he is. Colonel.’
    Butler shook his head.
    ‘We can find out easily enough, you’ll simply be saving us time, that’s all.’
    ‘You sound like a policeman, Colonel.’
    Butler’s lip curled.
    ‘Then perhaps I am one, Mr Mitchell.’
    ‘But you don’t intend to tell me?’
    ‘Our business is official, not personal - will that do?’
    Emerson would curse him, thought Mitchell impotently, but there was no point in refusing. Anyone who could penetrate the Institute would make short work of tracing someone.
    ‘His telephone number is Parley Green 21242.’
    ‘You mean he’s at his home?’ The colonel’s eyes were as devoid of expression as his voice. ‘You’re sure? ‘
    ‘There’s a call-box in the entrance hall…’
    The hell with it, though; he was tired of being interrogated.
    ‘He was at home this morning. He said he was going to work there all day.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Mitchell.’ Butler half-turned, and then stopped just as Audley had done. ‘Your grandfather commanded the West Mercians in 1918 … What did your father do in the last war?’
    Again an abrupt change in the direction of the question. Only this time Mitchell had the feeling it wasn’t accidental; indeed, that none of the questions had been unplanned, but that the whole script had been planned with some obscure objective of their own in mind. And how many of the answers had they known in advance?
    ‘He worked on a farm in Wiltshire,’ he replied evenly, trying to match Butler’s tone.
    ‘He was a conscientious objector - a pacifist.’
    He stood for a time, staring at nothing. Then he picked up the phone on the windowsill.
    ‘Can you get me Parley Green 21242, please?’
    There had been a question on Butler’s face at the end, but he hadn’t turned it into words, so there was no telling whether it was the right one. But then when he thought about his grandfather, a colonel at twenty-six and a dead hero at twenty-seven, and his father, who’d reached the rank of under-cowman at the same age, he wasn’t sure what the right question was. Or that the answer would be in any book, even the one he was writing.
    The phone rang.
    ‘Your call, Mr Mitchell - there’s no answer. It sounds as though the phone’s out of order. The line’s dead as a doornail, sir.’

2
    AS HE INVARIABLY did when he came home by train, Mitchell finished the last lap of his journey by the short-cut along the towpath.
    Actually