Free Dying to Tell by Robert Goddard Page A

was. Bloody efficient. And that's rarer than you'd think."
    "Rarer than rubies," intoned Hoare.
    "Masefield again?" I asked. But all I got for an answer was a glare.
    "Anyway," said Dibley, "I'd not seen Rupe for quite a while, thanks to this Tokyo posting, when he turned up here at the end of August. It was the day after the bank holiday. Pretty quiet. Lots of people away. And he hadn't made an appointment. He was lucky to find me in the office."
    "Or unlucky," said Hoare.
    "Charlie reckons he was hoping I wouldn't be in. So he could have a sniff around on the strength of looking for me."
    "What would he be sniffing around afterT
    "Ah, well, that's the question, isn't it? What was he up to? I didn't know he'd already resigned from Eurybia. In fact, I assumed Eurybia had sent him. It's certainly what he led me to believe. He said the company was worried about a client they'd been dealing with: Pomparles Trading. Had I heard any whispers about them? The answer was no. Of course, it later transpired that Rupe was Pomparles Trading. Anyway, we popped down here for lunch. That's when I began to notice a few .. . differences."
    "In Rupe?"
    "Yeh. He was drinking more, for a start. I had trouble keeping up. It'd normally be the other way round. And he was .. . well, wilder, I suppose. Talking more loudly than usual. Waving his arms around. Like he was ... high on something. I asked him about Tokyo, but he didn't seem to want to go into it."
    "What did he want to go into?"
    "The past, funnily enough."
    "Nineteen sixty-three," murmured Hoare.
    "Exactly," Dibley went on. "Nineteen sixty-three. He asked me what I remembered of it. Well, I was still at primary school then. A few things stuck in my mind, naturally. All the tobogganing me and my brother did. It was a cold winter. We had a lovely summer holiday in Cornwall as well. Then there was the big stuff Profumo, Kennedy, the Great Train Robbery. I trotted them out, with what little a tacker like me understood at the time. Rupe seemed to be hanging on my every word. When I'd finished, he said, "Ever heard of Stephen Townley, Col?"
    Stephen Townley. So, there he was again. The face in the photograph. The figure from the past. "Had you?" I asked, to cover my surprise.
    "Nope. The name meant nothing to me. I asked Rupe if I should have done, if this Townley had done something notable back in 'sixty-three. Rupe said, "No, you shouldn't have heard of him. But, yes, he did do something notable in nineteen sixty-three. And you will be hearing about it. I'll make sure of that."
    "What did he mean?"
    "God knows. He was talking in riddles. Playing some weird game of his own. There's not much that annoys me more than the old "I know something you don't know but I can't tell you what it is" routine. I asked him once what he was getting at and when he dodged the question, I dropped the subject."
    "And Rupe dropped it too?"
    "For a while. But he came back to it as we were leaving. At least, I think he did. It was pretty ambiguous. "Wouldn't it be good," he said, "just once, to make a difference?" "A difference to what?" I asked. But all he did was smile at me. Then he muttered something I didn't quite catch "You'll see," I think got into his car and drove away. I phoned Charlie when I got back to the office and asked him if Rupe was, well, all right."
    "Not all right, I think we can say now, don't you?" Hoare raised his eyebrows at me. "I told Colin that Rupe was a couple of days away from serving out his notice to us, that he hadn't gone to Tilbury on Eurybia business, that as far as we knew he was still in Tokyo and that I'd never heard of the Pomparles Trading Company. When I looked into it, though, I found Pomparles on our system as a new client, with a container of aluminium on its way here from Yokohama. I was too busy to do any more about it at the time. If Rupe wanted to play silly buggers, I reckoned that was his affair." He gave a wry smile. "Seems I should have taken it more seriously."