For the Good of the State Read Online Free PDF

something on the incidence of stinging nettles; that was always the way of it, simultaneously enlightening and frustrating: there was always someone who had got there, or been there, before, asking the same questions—)
    ‘Thank you.’ He made his peace with the policeman with a smile. He must stop thinking about old Ranulf‘’s adulterine castle now. It might not be a panic at all, but just Phillipson (or whoever) pulling rank unnecessarily, for any one of a thousand footling reasons, to pick someone else’s brains. Or even to take a look at Willy, maybe—
    No, it could hardly be that. Willy was a known quantity, and he had registered his friendship with her, as the rules required. So they couldn’t read the riot act over her.
    He lengthened his stride. Only another few yards and he would be able to look down on the lane which had once briefly been the busy road to Ranulf’s illegal strongpoint, but which must just as quickly have degenerated back to the mere farm track it had become for ever after, under Henry Plantagenet’s iron-fisted rule. Poor old Ranulf—
    Poor old Tom ! He amended the thought instantly as he looked down on the gateway, and saw Henry Jaggard. Poor old Tom !
    Jaggard? Christ! When he’d thought of the mountain coming to Mahomet, he’d only thought of Snowdon or Ben Nevis, not Mont Blanc or the North Face of the bloody Eiger!
    ‘Sir?’ At least he didn’t need to pretend not to be astonished. Even if he’d been wrong about Willy—even if Willy had been a KGB major in drag—that wouldn’t justify the presence of Henry Jaggard here in Ranulf’s lane, just by the opening in Ranulf’s bailey ditch.
    ‘Tom, dear boy!’ Henry Jaggard surveyed him with fleeting distaste. ‘I am sorry to come upon you like this—’ He looked around ‘—in the middle of nowhere.’ He came back to Tom with a basilisk smile. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
    The middle of nowhere was right thought Tom with sudden insight: Jaggard knew exactly what he was doing, and why he was here—and who he was with, down to the room number in the hotel. Because it was Jaggard’s right and business to know that. But it was still the middle of nowhere.
    ‘I’m just doing another motte-and-bailey , sir.’ Tom accepted the fiction, and played up to it deliberately. ‘I think it’s one of the illegal castles Ranulf of Caen built during the reign of King Stephen—mid-twelfth century. But no one’s ever done precise measurements on it.’ Time for a disarming grin. ‘It’s down as a late-13th-century fortified manor in Herrick’s Medieval Earthworks , actually. But I don’t think Herrick ever took the trouble to look at it.’
    ‘Is that so?’ Polite lack-of-interest in exchange for disarming grin. No one was fooling anyone. “That’s rather interesting, I should think.‘ Jaggard took another survey of the middle of nowhere. ’But I can perhaps understand why he didn’t—Herrick, was it?‘ Jaggard had plainly no more heard of Professor Albert Herrick than he had of—of, say, Ranulf himself … or of Ranulf’s contemporary, King Boleslas III of Poland, whom Tom’s Dzieliwski ancestors had served. ’It is rather inaccessible isn’t it!’
    Yes, thought Tom. And as good a place as Henry Jaggard could hope for, to meet poor Tom Arkenshaw unobserved and off-the-record!
    Jaggard cocked a knowing eye at him. ‘And Miss Wilhemina Groot doesn’t mind braving the wilds of the English countryside with you, then?’
    ‘No, sir.’ The bugger didn’t need to throw Willy into the conversation so crudely. ‘Her ancestors built forts like this in Iowa and Minnesota, against the Sioux in the 1860s, so she tells me—’ Tom gestured towards Ranulf’s ramparts ‘—not the same design, of course … but the same general defensive idea, more or less—just earth and timber-work and man-hours— plus ça change, and all that.
    ‘Is that so?’ Henry Jaggard opened his mouth to continue, but Tom owed