The Partridge Kite
Read The Partridge Kite Online
Authors: Michael Nicholson
For my wife Diana
The kite was flown at partridge shoots so that when the birds were flushed out by the beaters they would see above them the silhouette of a hawk and would fly low, making themselves easier targets for the guns.
From the Museum, Brympton D’Evercy House, Somerset
Fr
iday, 10 December
The explosion was timed for 6.45 p.m., one hour after the bank manager, his assistant and the three security guards had locked up and gone. The seven crates of bullion were safely stacked in the strongroom, twenty feet underground.
The blast blew away the entire wall of the building in Threadneedle Street in the City of London. Five people at the bus stop some yards down at the Bishopsgate junction were killed instantly, and another eleven taken to hospital, mutilated by the shrapnel of glass and masonry. In the chaos the seven crates of bullion were trollied into an ambulance and driven the half-mile to Gardners Corner, Whitechapel, where the East End meets the City. Men in the uniform of the London Ambulance Service pushed the trolleys towards other men in helmets, visors and security guard uniforms, who, keeping the momentum of the trolleys, wheeled them up light steel ramps into the recognisable armoured security tracks. At three minutes past seven - eighteen minutes after the four hundred pounds of gelignite C4 was detonated — the ambulance and the security trucks moved off in different directions. And four and a quarter million pounds in gold bullion was on its way to new owners.
One hundred and ninety miles away, just north of Flamborough on the Yorkshire coast an Alouette helicopter lifted off from the helipad of Temax International Oil, red navigation lights spinning at its tail and glass dome.
Temax ‘Bravo Lima’ was a familiar sight and sound at any time of the day or night, ferrying oil executives and engineers fifty miles out into the North Sea to the three Temax drilling rigs stationed in the ZB38 licence area. But tonight ‘Bravo Lima’ was making an unscheduled flight. As the sound of the rotors disappeared into the drizzle, the pilot and ground crew were already dialling 999 from telephones in the crew hut and the nearby taxi rank.
‘Bravo Lima’s’ new pilot had already swung the machine on to a heading of 036 degrees mag. which, with a constant airspeed, would bring him to his target in less than twenty minutes. By the time the second man aboard had unpacked, retaped and primed the bomb, the yellow glare of the Temax ‘Virginia’ rig was already clearly visible to the right, less than three hundred yards away and two hundred feet down.
The aim was perfect. Given the fifteen-second time fuse, ‘Bravo Lima’ was six hundred feet away from the shrapnel area before the explosion ripped away part of the steel platform close to the generator housing. It set off a series of smaller explosions, spilling hundreds of gallons of diesel oil until the entire platform, half the size of a football pitch, was on fire. ‘Bravo Lima’s’ pilot set his course again, keeping the machine below the five hundred feet radar surveillance height. The bomber next to him carefully rolled up a small screwdriver and a pair of chrome pincers into a white handkerchief and looked back over his shoulder. To see men jumping into the sea, on fire.
Reginald Scammill had no need to wear such a heavy overcoat: he was sweating and uncomfortable. There was a slight drizzle but there was no breeze. He tugged at his collar to loosen his tie and heard the collar-button snap. He found himself hurrying, pushing past the late London evening crowds. But as he entered Leicester Square tube station he remembered he was on his way home and he relaxed a little. He shuffled along in the queue for his ticket and paid his eighty pence to get home to Buckhurst Hill, to the sanctuary of his semi in suburban Essex. He opened his hands, podgy pink hands, fingers yellowed, and saw how his nails had dug into his palms. His hands had been clenched most of the time since he’d left Brussels three hours ago. But within an hour he’d be having his evening cocoa and sandwich in the kitchen with his wife.
The trip had been successful - so successful he still couldn’t believe it. Nor had his Executive. But he’d left them a few minutes ago dotting the i’s of the Press Release and fighting for who’d be spokesman on the radio and television news bulletins tomorrow. Full backing from the Belgians, Dutch, French and Italians - only the Germans had refused. But they didn’t matter now anyway, with such support from the others. He’d won, despite the backtracking from his own members, despite the vicious Press attacks, despite the warnings from his treasurer that they’d only got enough money for five weeks. It had come off and he was set for the big once-and-for-all showdown. And he would win! He barged his way through the automatic ticket barrier, cursing as his squat round body became jammed in it. He held a small plastic holdall high in one hand and began dragging his briefcase through the rubber doors. He paused at the top of the escalator, fumbling with his baggage, pushing his spectacles and the ticket into his top left-hand coat pocket, a routine that did away with the frenzy at the ticket gate the other end. He was a man who flustered easily.
The tall man stood less than a yard away from Scammill, carrying an umbrella. Leicester Square underground station has the longest, steepest escalator in the entire London Underground system, which makes it the longest, steepest escalator in the world. Reginald Scammill stepped on to the first moving steel step, felt a sharp push from behind as the umbrella dug into his spine and glimpsed very briefly but vividly an advertisement for body stockings as he hurtled towards the concrete floor below. He bounced and broke his neck violently at the first impact twenty feet down, his body turning several times.
The push had been hard and he accelerated downwards, unchecked by any contact with travellers standing on the right. But forty feet down the body, with the heavy overcoat billowing, struck an Iranian gesticulating to a French au pair he’d picked up at the ticket queue a minute before. The body carried the Iranian, his eyes staring, his mouth open, downwards at over fifty miles an hour. The au pair went screaming after them, grabbing blindly at the rubber handrail as she fell. The three bodies landed one hundred and sixty-one feet down, a second apart, sprawled across each other like some perverted act caught on Polaroid. Scammill’s briefcase, office papers and the dirty underwear from his overnight bag scattered beneath and around them. The minute hand on the clock above, advertising Dutch cigars, moved a fraction to ten minutes past twelve.
The death of Reginald Scammill, militant Marxist General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, just made the last run of the London editions, sharing the headlines the following morning with the two other stories: the five deaths of the bullion raid bystanders and the bombing of Temax ‘Virginia’ with casualties ten times higher. Whereas all other newspapers gave each of the three stories equal prominence on their front pages, the
Sun
filling its front page with three massive headlines, only the
Morning Star
considered Scammill’s death merited a sole banner headline. Their story read: ‘A spokesman for the NUR confirmed this morning that Mr Scammill’s tragic accident had made it necessary for the proposed international rail strike to be postponed indefinitely pending his funeral and the opening of new talks between the Executive and the Rail Board. It follows a new initiative during the night by the Prime Minister. The Rail Unions of other Continental countries who had pledged their support will not now be called upon to engage together in what would have been the first ever internationally co-ordinated strike.’
The man in the first-class carriage read each newspaper report in turn from the neat pile on his right. He stretched. The waiter in the corridor called the first sitting for breakfast as the train passed Derby on its way north. The man laid his umbrella across his window seat and followed the waiter down the corridor to the restaurant car.
S
aturday, 11 December
The Prime Minister turned his back and listened involuntarily.
‘It confirms all he told us,’ Knightley said, ‘all he warned us of three days ago. He said there’d be a bank raid. He said there’d be a bombing - something where we’d recognise the symbolism immediately - and a political murder. It’s all there in Kellick’s report.’
Kenneth Knightley, Personal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, watched his employer’s profile on the first floor of Number 10 Downing Street, the dull, cramped, unimpressive house tucked away in a dead-end off Whitehall.
Knightley’s needling, carping voice had annoyed the Prime Minister, reminding him of the previous night’s events in a way that suggested that he, Knightley alone, cared about the awful loss of life.
The Prime Minister was hunched in his chair, staring out of his side window on to Horse Guards Parade and across to the lake in St James’s Park. He could see the fountain through the leafless plane trees and the figures of the five stone soldiers in their stone tunics on the Guards Memorial.
It was drizzling. It always seemed to, he thought, at times like this. He’d had a long experience of disasters, sometimes personal, sometimes political, usually the interaction of both. Always, it seemed, he was at their centre, it was always he who had to engineer a solution. Or, if there wasn’t the manoeuvrability, ensure that someone else was left dangling. He had always believed that prime ministers were not expendable.
Today was Saturday, it was raining and Knightley was carping. The Prime Minister remembered Kellick’s report. Richard Kellick was Department Head of Special State Operations, a relatively new Department within the British Secret Service which dealt exclusively with threats to the British Government and vital British institutions which could not normally be handled by MI6 or any of the three military services.
Special State Operations was not the Prime Minister’s brainchild but it had come into being under his Premiership. There had not been another Premier for some years.
The Prime Minister reached across his wide mahogany desk for the manilla envelope, opened it and laid Kellick’s report on his lap. The report had been sealed ‘for his eyes only’ and according to Kellick only three other men knew of it - Kellick himself, another agent in his Department who’d typed it, and Knightley, who would need to know of it anyway sooner or later. The Prime Minister spoke for the first time in ten minutes.
‘Knightley,’ he said, turning in his chair away from London and the rain, ‘ring Kellick. Have him here straight away. I want him to read this report to me slowly, so that I can understand every bloody little word.’
Knightley left, and as he turned to close the door he saw the Prime Minister, still hunched, hands resting on the pages of the report, now facing the window again, staring at the rain. Knightley paused, and saw the dandruff flaked across the Prime Minister’s shoulders. Tiny particles of dead skin shone like snow on the dark grey material of his suit.
Nice to have some snow, Knightley said to himself as he closed the door - first time in four years. Could take the children tobogganing in Richmond Park.
How convenient, thought the Prime Minister, that Scammill should trip like this so close to his bloody international rail strike. It would have crippled this country. Worse, it would have led to a confrontation that almost certainly would have forced him to resign. You can’t survive without a little bit of luck, he thought, and this was certainly the best he’d had for a very long time. He almost smiled but his eyes dropped to the pages resting on his knees and he suddenly felt cold.
He felt a familiar feeling in his chest - the feeling that had begun over sixty years ago when he’d heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs leading to the tiny bedroom. The tight feeling of fear of the Sam Browne belt, punishment for some little childish crime committed so innocently, so long ago.
The title on the folder read CORDON.
‘The interview, Prime Minister, was conducted last Wednesday evening at 9.30 p.m. in my office. It was recorded on tape and there are only four written copies.’ Kellick knew the Prime Minister had always found it hard to listen, so he had perfected the shortest, most direct sentences when in his presence.
The Prime Minister was not put off by Kellick’s eagerness to please.
‘Kellick!’ - he used the high grating nasal voice normally reserved for Opposition Front-benchers. ‘I do not want all the farts and hesitations you’ve recorded on your tape machine. You will tell me, as clearly as you can, what it means - what it adds up to, what this bloody man is threatening us with.’
Kellick looked up. ‘The man gives his name as Sanderson, Christian name Francis. We have no way of checking this. When he entered Cannon Row police station on Wednesday he was carrying no documents, no driving licence, no letters, not even a tailor’s tag on his suit. All his clothes, even his underwear, were brand new, most of them bought at Marks and Spencer the previous day. Forensic tests on his shoes and socks show he could only have been wearing them for a few hours and that he had only been wearing them in the London area. We’ve no prints on him, by the way, or voice tapes. We might of course be permitted to find a way of helping him volunteer more?’
The Prime Minister looked up and right through Kellick as if Kellick’s head was transparent and he was examining the wall beyond. How he loathed the business Kellick represented! How he loathed them, especially at times like this, with their sinister innuendos and their talk of ‘persuasion’.
He remembered a late-night drunken conversation some years ago with the then Home Secretary, who had said that the only torture techniques the Prime Minister knew about were what were referred to in the trade as the ‘soft options’.
‘When your stomach’s as hard as your heart,’ the Home Secretary had told him, ‘get Mr Bloody Kellick to describe what they do to the obstinate sods!’
Kellick went on, ‘You’ll see from your report. Prime Minister, that Sanderson walked into Cannon Row police station last Wednesday, 8 December. He insisted on seeing a senior officer privately. He spoke eventually to a superintendent and as soon as Sanderson mentioned our Department he phoned us immediately. In his report the super says that he was impressed by the man, that he was well-spoken - whatever’s meant by that - well-dressed and was obviously not a drunk or drugged or a crank.
‘Sanderson was brought to my Department at 1915 hours and I was brought into the interview at eight o’clock. I asked him to repeat everything he had said at Cannon Row and to the agent who’d brought him over.