October Men by Anthony Price

faintest idea where he was.”
    He paused to let the enormity of the security breach sink in. “He slunk off on the cheap night flight. And if we didn’t have this dead man on our hands we’d never have checked up on him either, because he’s supposed to be on ten days’ leave that was due to him.”
    Foolish! By damn, it was that right enough, thought Richardson bitterly. And more than that: it was almost the classic pattern for a defection, neither too elaborate nor too simple, but just enough to delay precipitate action under normal circumstances.
    Only a dead man had blown it sky high—it hadn’t even required any malice of Latimer’s to stir things after that. No bloody wonder they were all in a muck sweat.
    But he still needed time to think—time, and a lot more information.
    “Mrs. Clark,” he exclaimed suddenly. Almost the classic pattern, but not quite: Mrs. Clark was the odd thread in the design. She was a lot more than David’s cleaning woman, he knew that: she had been an integral part of the landscape of the Old House for over half a century. As a young girl she had mothered the lonely boy after his real mother’s death, had been his confidant in the stepmother era and had naturally graduated to the post of housekeeper when he had come into his kingdom. Indeed, during one long drunken evening on that last assignment in the north David had as good as hinted that it had only been with her approval that he had married Faith. So it was not in the least surprising that she alone knew where he had gone. But if he hadn’t intended to come back he would have sworn her to secrecy, and she would have kept the secret over a regiment of bodies.
    “What about her?” Stocker watched him narrowly.
    “What does she say?”
    Stocker grimaced. “Nothing—that’s the trouble.”
    “Nothing? But she told you David’s Rome address?”
    “She told us that, yes. And she told us that someone shot at her husband. But beyond that she won’t say a word. She won’t even admit that her husband shot back, even though they found him with the shotgun still in his hands.”
    “What does Charlie say?”
    Stocker stared at him, frowning. “He won’t say anything either. Apparently she told him to keep quiet, and that’s just what he’s done. The police can’t get a word out of either of them.”
    He could well believe the news of Charlie’s silence, because Charlie was taciturn by nature as well as obedient to his wife by long-established custom. But Mrs. Clark’s closed mouth was another matter, and a much more suspicious one too. In an unnaturally garrulous moment her husband had once observed that she talked enough for two, and it was the plain truth: she had a tongue like a teenager’s transistor.
    “I’d like to have a go at her then,” said Richardson. “She doesn’t know you, but she does know me and I think I’d stand a better chance with her than most anyone else.”
    “I’m relieved to hear that you think so,” said Stocker, with the ghost of a calculating smile. “Because that, Peter, is one of the chief reasons why you are here.”
    There was a large man in thornproof tweeds talking to another man in a rain-darkened trenchcoat outside the door to the dining room. At second glance Trenchcoat was maybe an inch taller than Tweeds, but Tweeds carried a weight of confidence and authority which gave him extra inches, the boss-man’s eternal unfair advantage.
    When they turned towards Stocker, however, their faces bore exactly the same guarded expression in which deference and hostility exactly cancelled each other out. Richardson had seen that look before and understood it only too well. He even felt a twinge of sympathy: on its own this was a nasty little affair, involving firearms— which the British police violently disliked—and a shooting match between civilians—which mortally offended them. But at least it was clear enough what had happened, or so it must have seemed at first glance.
    But