Free Colonel Butler's Wolf by Anthony Price Page A

Sir Frederick were disposed to take him seriously it might be that this business could suddenly turn into a very hot potato indeed.
    The conclusions presented themselves to Butler one after another in quick succession, last of all the most daunting one: hot potatoes were objects to pass on as smartly as possible.
    “Why hasn’t the Department handed over all this to the Special Branch?”
    “The Special Branch is not involved,” Audley snapped. “And we damn well want it to stay that way—uninvolved.”
    His prickliness took Butler aback. If there was one thing the Department prided itself on, it was those hard-won cooperative relations with the Branch.
    But the reaction wasn’t lost on Audley. “I know it’s not how we usually go about things. But the Branch has its sticky fingers in student politics, and we don’t want any part of that. The young blighters can sit-in or sit down as much as they like. They can lie down for all we care, if that’s what turns them on. Provided it’s all their own idea, not something somebody else wants them to do to further some other idea.”
    “Somebody being the Russians.”
    “Russians, Martians—it doesn’t matter who. But in this case the Russians, yes.”
    Butler scowled. “What the hell do they hope to get out of it?”
    Audley maintained a poker face. “Perhaps the Master of King’s will be able to tell you. But I can tell you what we stand to lose.”
    “What?”
    “Just suppose the Press got hold of Comrade Zoshchenko. It’s bad enough the way the public feels about the students as it is. But what price the Council for Academic Freedom if someone came up with a genuine subversion story? Christ, man—it’d set higher education back years. And then we’d have a real student problem on our hands.”
    Butler nodded slowly. There might or might not be a plot of some sort, though he found it hard to believe even now, after Eden Hall. But there was the makings of a spectacular scandal, that was certain. And from such a scandal one might expect a fierce anti-student backlash.
    If that was the aim it was clever, but not new. Indeed, it was no more than another version of the technique being used at the very moment by the IRA gunmen in Northern Ireland: Make your enemy repressive. And if he isn ’ t so by nature, make him so by provocation.
    “Then why haven’t they blown the gaff on Zoshchenko already?” he asked suddenly, as the thought struck him.
    Audley shook his head. “That’s what really scares me, Butler. Because it means that scandal isn’t their objective, it’s just something extra we’ve got to worry about. I’ve a feeling that they must be playing for much higher stakes than that. And I can tell you—I don’t like the feeling one little bit.”

VII
    IT WAS A very small gap through which Neil Smith had broken into Pett’s Pond, and thereby from Earth to Heaven— or to wherever would give houseroom to Paul Zoshchenko.
    Indeed, it had hardly been a gap at all, more the sort of dog-eared hole small boys made at their natural break-in point where the hedge and the council’s road safety fence met. Even now, when it had been enlarged and trampled, it was insignificant: a very small gap.
    Butler retraced his steps carefully along the soggy bank, ducking under the spindly alder branches, and heaved himself back to the roadside. As he steadied himself on the splintered end of the fence he felt the post move under his hand. Either it had been already loose, or maybe Smith had given it a passing clout on his way to the pond: it was impossible to say, because every mark of his passage had been overprinted with other people’s slide and slither.
    But he had expected no less, and it had not been for any tangible clues that he had broken his journey at Pett’s Pool. If there was anything to be had here it lay in the trained memories of Charon’s assistants, the local constable and the police surgeon.
    The first of these stood waiting for him beside