War Game by Anthony Price Page A

assessment was wrong or right.
    A smile.
    “Quite right too. Take you a week to read—and then you’d only be where we are.”
    Cox had been right.
    “Which is nowhere?”
    “Which is nowhere.” The smile completed its journey and then vanished. “And you work for the Home Office, Dr. Audley—is that right?”
    Polite disbelief. Am I right ? meaning I am wrong, aren ’ t I ? Cox had understated the reality.
    “Does that matter, Superintendent?”
    “Not to me, sir. To my sergeant it might, I’m thinking.”
    Audley flicked a glance at the sergeant, to find that he too was being carefully scrutinised. He wondered whether the sergeant was thinking he’s old for this job, just as he’d been thinking a few moments before how very young the sergeant was. But then the sergeant could hardly know what the job was, of course.
    And that was one aspect of the truth which must be ducked. “I’ll try not to keep him too long.”
    “No skin off my nose. He isn’t really one of mine, not yet.”
    “Not … one of yours?”
    “He’s been attached to me for this case.
    Audley frowned. “You mean he’s not CID?”
    “He has been. And he will be again before I’m very much older. But at this moment he’s uniform branch.”
    They were up to the second of the two things he needed from the Superintendent before he had asked the first vital question. But Weston had already half answered that with his suspicion that Audley wasn’t just a Home Office busybody: clearly he’d already smelt a rat in the Ratcliffe case.
    “Tell me about him, Superintendent.”
    “Sergeant Digby?” Weston’s face hardened. “He’s a good copper. With the makings of a very good one.”
    “He looks very young … to be a sergeant.”
    “You think so?” Weston managed to look amused without softening his expression. “This time next year he’ll be an inspector.”
    Well, well! thought Audley. But then—why not? The police fought an unending war against crime, and in war the company commanders were often no older than Sergeant Digby. No doubt there’d been plenty of fresh-faced young captains-of-horse in Cromwell’s panzers, the New Model Army.
    “Indeed?” And, come to that, it didn’t take much imagination to turn Paul Mitchell into a hard-faced young colonel, not yet out of his twenties. Ruthlessness had never been the prerogative of old age, after all.
    “Scholarship boy, Henry Digby was— Fenton Grammar School, before it went comprehensive.” Pride and regret were evenly distributed in Weston’s voice. “And they went for flyers then, too. Eleven ‘O’ levels he had, and three ‘A’ levels—good ones, too. Could have gone to university for the asking, and his mother wanted him to. A teacher, that’s what she had in mind for him.”
    “But he wanted to be a policeman?” Familiar pattern, even if the ambition was eccentric: all those examination honours were no good if mother couldn’t pass her psychology test. Likely she’d have stood a better chance of making a teacher of him if she’d insisted on helmet and handcuffs.
    Weston nodded. “Three commendations in his first two years. One year as a detective constable, and I marked him for accelerated promotion myself… . We sent him to Bramshill.”
    “Bramshill?”
    “Police College. One of the top three of his year.”
    “But then you put him back into uniform?”
    “That’s the rule. Uniform sergeant for one year. Then automatic promotion to inspector—and I’ll have him as one of mine if it’s the last thing I do. He’s the sort we need, a born thief-taker if ever I saw one … bright, but not flashy. That’s the way they made ‘em at Fenton Grammar when old Jukes was headmaster. So you be careful of him … sir.” The hard look was granite now. “I want him back when you’ve finished with him, too.”
    “I wasn’t thinking of kidnapping him, Superintendent.”
    “No?” Granite veined with calculation. “Just so he doesn’t acquire a taste