The Memory Trap Read Online Free PDF

Kulik, Mitchell.’
    ‘Not a lot.’ Mitchell sniffed. ‘Does anyone know more than that?’ He glanced at Audley quickly. ‘Have you pulled the’ rabbit out of the hat again, Dr Audley— Professore — ? ’
    ‘No.’
    Mitchell flickered another glance at him. ‘You’re about to remind me that Kulik also called the shots—day, time and place—are you?’
    Audley winced at the repetition of “shots”. But, having talked to both Jack Butler and Elizabeth, Mitchell had it all pat, evidently. And meanwhile the car was beginning to slow down again.
    ‘And it didn’t do him a lot of good—is that it?’ This time Mitchell didn’t bother to look at him. ‘Don’t worry, David. I haven’t forgotten that. It’s at the very top of my list that I’m your minder.’
    Audley was about to look away in exasperation. But then he caught a glimpse of the sea beyond Mitchell’s profile.
    The sea at last! “ The sea! The sea! ” — the cry of Xenophon ’ s ten thousand fellow-Greeks had been dinned into him so thoroughly at school by old Wimpy long ago that the words always came back to him at every first sight of it, at first almost triumphantly, and then almost sadly as he became conscious of the length of years which now separated him from that first-learning!
    ‘What is it, David?’ Mitchell sat bolt-upright. ‘What have you seen?’
    ‘Just the sea.’ The man was a bag of nerves. ‘That’s all.’
    But it wasn’t all. And it wasn’t just the sea—it was the Bay of Naples … Old Wimpy’s Bay of Naples—no, not Naples, but Neapolis , with Pompeii and Herculaneum close at hand, and Paestum just down the road: the happy hunting-ground of every Classics-master who had ever had to hammer irregular verbs into—
    The sea — ? This time he also sat bolt-upright. ‘What the hell—?’
    ‘What—?’ Mitchell’s nerves had been jarred again.
    Audley looked around as best he could within the maddening constraint of his safety belt and the ridiculous little car itself. ‘The sea’s on the wrong side. This isn’t the way to Amalfi.’
    ‘ What ?’ Mitchell’s voice cracked with exasperation.
    ‘Where the hell are we?’ He fumbled with the window-winder: if the sea was on that side—where were they going?
    ‘We’re in a traffic jam, is where we are—what d’you mean, “the wrong side”—? For Christ ’ s sake, David! Don ’ t do that — get your head in — ‘ The rest of the command was drowned by a cacophony of horns behind them.
    Audley could see the jam of cars. But it was about all he could see: with one pantechnicon behind them and another trying to push them off the road, wherever Vesuvius might be, it could be anywhere. But they were undoubtedly in a traffic jam: they were on the approach to some sort of Italian clover-leaf junction, and that seemed to be a sauve qui peut invitation to every driver to assert himself, according to his courage if not the size of his vehicle.
    ‘Get your head back in please, David.’ Mitchell ignored the noise behind him and recovered some of his cool. ‘ Please , David — ‘
    The very coolness turned Audley back towards Mitchell, because of its underlying panic: it caught exactly the final desperation of that Royal Sussex corporal on the grenade-throwing primary training exercise long ago, when Trooper Arkwright in front had held on to his live grenade between them, instead of throwing it out of the drill-trench—
    ‘Throw it.’ (Matter-of-fact, the corporal. Almost conversational.) ‘ Throw it — ‘ (No longer matter-of-fact: frozen-faced, rather—was that the face? But he couldn’t remember the face: faces sometimes eluded him.) ‘THROW IT—!’ (Memory blanked out at that point, as the Royal Sussex corporal and Trooper Audley had hit the dirt in the bottom of the trench, in an attempt to reach Australia before the grenade exploded)—
    He found himself smiling as he turned. Time had quite washed away the sick horror of that moment,