The Partridge Kite (10 page)

He leant down, pulled the fan heater by its cord nearer the bed and turned its switch to High.

Instructions over the telephone had been that Tom should use the six people as the means for finding who in turn controlled and directed them.

‘We know the six are actively involved in subversive activities contrary to British interests,’ Hampton had said, ‘but without direction they cannot move on their own.’

The orders were to check them out, in person if necessary, hopefully to panic them into a sudden move; to make them do something not in the plan - and find out who they answered to.

The previous day’s hassle about Hampton’s extraordinary timetable of Monday night - the schedule to Malmö and Hampton’s recalcitrance in not telling Tom all he knew - had been easily explained. The private Hawker Siddeley 125 Executive jet was not Hampton’s but his clients’ - the merchant bankers. It was, Hampton had said facilely, at Tom’s service whenever he felt the Scandinavian Airlines schedules were not convenient.

And as for recalcitrance. . . really no! Caution, certainly - but that after all is the first rule of security. When you are dealing with someone for the first time, Hampton had said in a supercilious way over the telephone, a little knowledge is the safest thing!

The fault was not Fry’s. The absurd platitude was Kellick’s, one of an inexhaustible stock.

Tom seemed satisfied enough. He felt anyway that he was getting close to the truth in his own way. He felt too that sooner or later . . . and it would probably be sooner than later. . . the aliases Hampton had busily built up for himself and his clients would have to be pulled away. It was only a matter of time, Tom was convinced, before he was introduced to his real employers. If the game was as big as it seemed to be, they couldn’t afford this double-act for long.

‘God!’ he said aloud. ‘What a bastard hole this is!’ He looked around him at the cold drab green-emulsioned bedroom; socks, shoes, newspapers scattered everywhere. Odd mugs on the floor half-full. It was at times like this that he was reminded he was alone. No family, few friends, no one he could ring up, no one just as desperate for a chat and a pint. There was no local pub to pop into to escape these moments of aloneness, knowing there’d be someone there he’d recognise enough to stand two pints on the bar and share the warmth and chatter.

So, more often than not, he’d open another bottle of Scotch, fill up a saucepan with ice cubes from the deep-freeze, pull the blankets about him and watch television - taking in nothing but Scotch until he fell asleep, drunk.

But tonight he wouldn’t get drunk. He would make an early start tomorrow. The sooner this was all over, the sooner ten thousand pounds would join the other five in his bank. And then Greece! A month, maybe two. A rented house on the Islands, sun, dolmades and sheftalia, cheap domestica and more sun.

The telephone rang. It was Kate.

‘I was thinking of you,’ she said.

Tom recognised immediately the timbre of her voice and was grateful. He knew what it meant.

‘And I was thinking of Greece, sweetheart.’ His cheeriness almost gave him away.

‘Are you alone?’ she asked.

‘Good Lord, no! I’ve a roomful of queer Italian waiters who’ve promised to perform acts of gross indecency never before seen north of Milan. In return I’m doing the Lebanese basket trick with my charlady! Of course I’m alone, Kate. I’ll be over.’

He heard her laughing as he put the phone down.

Within seven minutes he had showered, shaved, talcumed, cleaned his teeth and brushed his hair. Within twenty minutes he was in Chelsea warming his stomach with Kate’s malt whisky and his hands by Kate’s open fire which burnt evenly and with a welcome.

He was sitting on the goatskin rug directly in front of the fire, legs crossed. Kate was kneeling directly behind him, her arms clasped around Ins chest, her head nuzzling by his, blonde hair falling over her forehead hiding her face, her chin resting on his shoulder.

His eyes were closed and the heat from the fire made his face tingle. He could feel, he was certain of it, the malt moving into his blood, feel it leaving the stomach walls, pumped into the arms and legs. He smiled like the famous cat. Maybe it was the smell of her, the scent of her skin and her hair. Maybe it was the promise - the unsaid promise that always accompanied evenings like tonight.

She knelt motionless. Seldom in these moods would they talk. They were after all old lovers and thoughts were transmitted in other ways - the touch, the kiss, the warm concentrated breath from the nose on his neck, deliberately aimed. They were old, fierce lovers and at times like this they dwelt on their own, reminding themselves of previous moments, reliving the sex they’d shared, acting out again the foreplay in their minds. They were comfortable together in this nest of white goatskin.

Slowly, as her blood rose, Kate began moving her hands backwards and forwards across Tom’s chest and down to his stomach, fingers pushing between the openings of his shirt undoing the buttons. Her nipples grew and rose hard. She pressed each in turn against his shoulder blades. She felt his back muscles tense and began kissing and licking his ear,
running
her moist tongue gently down his neck and up again.

Tom sat quite still. She expected him to; it was all established. She would enjoy his hard stillness, would finally go down to him groaning, grabbing with her mouth. And then Tom would take her, take his lips, his tongue to every part of her, tasting her, enveloped by her, covered by her hair, her writhing tanned soft body, the long thighs and the silk down on them. There was no world beyond her . . . nothing but her surrounding him. She was the womb; he felt suspended again.

They slept naked and exhausted, locked together on the rug as the fire slowly died. Sleepily Kate reached out and pulled the goatskins over them; and they slept cocooned in warmth.

Outside it was beginning to snow, large flat flakes that settled on the icy London pavements without melting. Across the river, on the south side of the Thames, a clock struck two. It was Thursday, 16 December. Nine days to Christmas.

Thursday, 16 December

Curran-Price received his instructions from CORDON sooner than he’d expected. A telegram arrived with the morning post. There was no signature, no other identification except the date stamp of origin. Central Post Office Cardiff.

It read simply:

‘YOUR ABSENCE REQUIRED STOP SUGGEST FIVE DAY EXCURSION YOUR CHOICE STOP ESSENTIAL REPEAT ESSENTIAL YOU RETURN AND CONTACT MORNING
22ND
FOR FINAL BRIEFING.’

Curran-Price and his wife caught the Alitalia flight from Heathrow to Rome and three hours later, as the other passengers were clearing immigration and customs, he telephoned his London office to explain his unexpected and sudden departure. He told his secretary a relative of his wife was dying - only hours to go - there was really no time to explain from London, they’d only just caught the flight as it was. He gave her the address, telephone and telex number of the hotel - and said he’d give her the flight details of his return trip as soon as the funeral arrangements had been settled.

Curran-Price was a sensible and cautious man. It was essential that there should be no alarm at his departure from London. His explanation would satisfy his own employers for the time being. And there was nothing State Security Operations could do about him here.

Important too that if CORDON should need him urgently they had only to inquire through his office, using one of a multitude of impressive aliases.

So while his wife spent his money in the Via del Corso, he settled down in the comfort of the Hotel Nationale in Piazza di Monteciterio safe from investigation. He would spend the next five days completing his plans for the Transport policy he would present to the civil servants at his new Ministry in the first few days of the New Year.

The advanced passenger train was travelling at over one hundred and twenty miles an hour but there was no suggestion of speed, and it was virtually noiseless except for the whistle of wind through the faulty rubbers in the window, and the slight sway as it passed, compressing the air ahead of it, through deserted and derelict country stations.

Tom sat back, enjoying his first British ride for years, head against the white linen antimacassar, feet up on the seat opposite, a morning newspaper protecting the expensive pile.

Outside it was snowing. He felt he’d been breathing snow since the moment he’d left Kate’s flat early that morning. Sometimes there’d be a pause in the storm and he could see beyond the embankments to the English countryside - Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, now leaving Sherborne for the Somerset border.

He could vaguely remember Somerset as a child of five. He’d been evacuated from his home in South London to a farm near Wells. This train ride took him back to that platform on Paddington Station; a child with his head out of the window, the smell of coal and steam, the large manilla label, his only identification, tied by string and fluttering from his new grey flannel jacket. His mother, twenty-six years old, her navy blue raincoat tied tightly round her slim waist, her red check scarf covering her brown hair, surrounded by other mothers, waving and crying. She’d suddenly turned her back on him but he could just see, as the train pulled away, her arms high across her face, covering her tears. Sobbing, childless, she caught the bus back home to Streatham, to the endless lonely nights, the air raid sirens, the blackouts and the wardens shouting at escaping light, to the shrapnel and the fires and the V2 rocket that finally buried her.

This was the first time he’d been back to die country of cider and apples in all that time. It was less than two hours’ travelling from London but it was a foreign country. He’d been travelling most of his adult life - Africa, Asia, the Americas - but the only part of the British Isles he’d really got to know well was Ulster. And he’d never considered that a part of Britain anyway.

Where was Bradford, Boston, Diss, Dymchurch? Which side of Scotland was Perth? For a long time he’d assumed the Eisteddfod was a Welsh county town. Unknown, unseen, now strangely hostile geography.

The train moved through Yeovil Junction and gathered speed again. He looked out of the window on both sides. This was not the Somerset of that five-year-old. There were no Pakistani porters on the platforms then. The countryside had changed. This had struck him all the way down; the counties were so alike. One endless Salisbury Plain. Vast tracts of land, few hedgerows, the same patterned fields, no copses, no irregularities, nothing wasted, nothing untouched. Everything symmetrical, made square by the barbed-wire fences.

And what had happened to the trees? Somerset was once full of trees - he could picture them even now. A child with freckles, squinting at the sun, tumbling into the hay, as men and women walked ahead tossing pitchforks from side to side, turning over the damp grass and offering it to the warm air and sun to dry and seal into winter feed. The men always wore flat caps whatever their age, all except the gaffers who wore brown bowlers. They had baling string tied tight round their legs, just below the knees, like coalmen.

He could remember the trees all around him then. . . trees for shade, trees to climb for birds’ eggs, trees that sprawled across the country lanes after a night’s storm, trees to escape to the day the red and white bull broke his chain, trees that hid the scores of rooks, crows and wood pigeons that would rise with the noise of a thousand football rattles as the twelve-bore shotguns exploded at hares and rabbits.

But now, looking out, he could see that the Somerset he had pictured had gone. The dumpy oaks, the willows deformed with years of whittling, did nothing to break the dull monotony of the bare fields.

The elms, the tallest and grandest of them all, were dead and next year’s children would never know what they’d lost Only their grandfathers would remember. He slept and forgot.

The train stopped abruptly: Newton Abbot, Devon. Tom collected up his newspapers and walked along the cold platform to the ticket collector. A taxi to Dartmouth would take forty minutes and cost fifteen pounds.

Colonel Haig, MC, looked younger and was much taller than Tom had expected. He was fifty-five, which made him very young indeed to have parachuted into occupied France in 1944; young, too, to be such a successful torturer in Malaya in 1950. He had a hard, very square face. It was creased with lines so deep and so black they looked as if they’d been put on with a crayon. He had short crinkly grey hair, so short and crinkly it looked African. His eyes were light grey and moist as if he had chronic hayfever.

He looked relaxed in country clothes - a squire.

‘I’m sorry for the confusion at the gate, Mr McCullin,’ he said. ‘My guards have instructions not to let anyone through to the house without first contacting me. I hope they weren’t too rude - I had told them you were coming. They are very security conscious - overso, I think, but it would be a mistake to caution them. They are so keen.’

‘No trouble. Colonel,’ Tom replied, ‘it was exactly what I’d expected; security is the byword of modem living. I wish I’d got into that line of business myself instead of what I ended up in.’

‘And what exactly have you ended up in, Mr McCullin?’ Haig was smiling very slightly; his eyes met Tom’s squarely.

‘I think I did mention it on the phone this morning. Colonel I’m a freelance television producer - mostly with ITV.’

Haig moved across the room to the sideboard, raised a sherry decanter and his eyes to Tom.

‘Thank you.’ Tom went on. ‘I think I said, too, that I’d like to do something on you, possibly a half-hour film; I’m pretty sure Granada would buy it for their “World in Action” series. In fact, I know they would.’

‘Why now, Mr McCullin?’

‘Why now what. Colonel?’

‘Why should you be so concerned about me now? Why not a year and a half ago when I was in the headlines? Why suddenly do you think I should be of any interest to people who watch commercial television?’

‘I gather your ideas now have some shape; that you have trained men and women who serve you on a kind of retainer and could at short notice be mobilised at a time of national emergency; a General Strike, for instance. The British Volunteers eighteen months ago was just so much talk. Today it is a very definite force - something tangible, something I can film.’

Haig handed the glass of sherry to Tom, beckoned at an armchair and sat down himself; he lit a cigar without offering one. The two men sat in front of an open log fire, Tom looking at Haig. The Colonel pulled one of the cast- iron firedogs towards him and rested his brown ankle-boot on it. Then, content, as if he had all the time in the world, balanced the sherry glass on the raised right knee.

‘You are an experienced producer, Mr McCullin? You have done things like it before - for Granada, I mean? Because if I agreed to provide you with my time and my facilities here on this estate, I wouldn’t want them wasted in the hands of an amateur.’

Tom felt the slightest rise of adrenalin . . . a warning signal.

‘I can’t guarantee to make the film to your exact requirements and taste. Colonel, but it will be reasonably objective and saleable.’

Haig sipped his Fino and began turning the stem of the glass with his finger and thumb. Tom noticed the right forefinger had been cut off at the first knuckle. It looked as if the glass was being caressed by two thumbs. Tom waited for the next question; he would volunteer nothing unless it was in answer to a direct question. He would work his way in slowly.

Haig suddenly leant forward and pressed a button sunk into the side of the Hamstone fireplace.

‘How long would it take, Mr McCullin, and when would you like to start? Would there be a fee?’

‘No fee. A week’s filming depending on the weather and how easily you can provide the things and people I want. . . and the sooner the better.’

A young man came in through heavy brocade curtains that hid a door on the far left-hand side of the room. He was blond, fresh-faced. Tom noticed that his neck just above the collar was red and grazed. He was wearing a simple uniform of dark blue. Serge trousers, a military shirt, breast pockets and epaulettes, but no markings, no badges anywhere.

‘Gosling,’ Haig held out his left hand, touching the man’s sleeve, ‘this is Mr McCullin, a freelance producer from television. He wants to do a kind of documentary on us.’ Gosling looked straight at Tom but there was nothing, not a smile, not a nod of acknowledgement - nothing. Tom noticed he was wearing black chukka boots with elastic sides, and they were so highly polished he could see the glow of the log-fire in the toes.

‘I think. Gosling,’ Haig went on, now holding the younger man’s arm, ‘that I’d better say “Yes” and join the Hall of Kings. I’d like you now to check on our state of readiness. After a couple more glasses of my sherry I’d like to show Mr McCullin around the estate. Let him see just a few of the things we’re up to. Oh! and one small thing you can do for me - just a little thing that might speed things along.’ He pulled a pen from his breast pocket. Gosling immediately and without a word handed him a pad. Haig, as far as Tom could see, wrote only five words. ‘Get someone,’ he said, ‘to sort this out for me - must be done now - might make a difference.’ Gosling read them but said nothing.

‘Sorry to bother you with trivialities. Gosling,’ Haig said as the younger man walked away towards the curtains.

‘Good man. Gosling,’ he said across to Tom, handing him the decanter. ‘Son of the Air Vice-Marshal. His father was a very old friend of mine. I’d known him for thirty-six years. It was he who took me on my first drop into France, April ’44 just south of Limoges. . . Flying Officer then, of course. I’d just got my second pip. Came back for me, too. Do you know how he came back for me, a month later? He flew from Manston in Kent wave-hopping at night in a single- engined Auster packed tight with extra fuel tanks and landed on the main N20 between the houses at Bonnac la Côte. Told me later he had fifteen yards or less each side of the wing. . . and no lights either! I haven’t met a pilot yet who believes that story, Mr McCullin, but it’s as true as that glass in your hand. IBs son is a chip off the old block. I’m proud to have him as my adjutant; I’m really the boy’s father now. His father was a very brave man, Mr McCullin. This country needs men like him, now, more than ever before.’

He paused. . . the reminiscence seemed to have made him melancholy; almost to himself he said, ‘Who knows . . . maybe we’ll get them too.’

Tom said nothing, allowing Haig to gaze back into the past uninterruptedly, waiting for him to return in his own time.

‘Well, Mr McCullin,’ Haig said at last, ‘how much do you know about us here? Have you done any research yet?’

‘Yes, but my press cuttings on you seem to dwell more on what you did rather than what you intend to do.’

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘since I made my idea public upwards of twenty thousand people have contacted me - that’s a lot of people! It certainly surprised me. Of that number, eight thousand have qualified after a course here, and another fifteen hundred are waiting in the queue. At this time we have exactly three hundred and ten volunteers training on the Estate.’

‘Nearly ten thousand people, trained by you, on retainer to you, ready to be mobilised by you?’

‘A quarter of the number I’d have liked but enough for our short-term purpose.’

‘Which is, Colonel?’ Tom said it too quickly, and regretted it.

‘By “short term” I didn’t mean “immediate”, Mr McCullin. I meant that our present numbers could deal quite adequately with any of the emergencies that are likely to test us, in the foreseeable future. But should the British Volunteers become a permanent feature of British law and order, I should expect to recruit four or five times that number of men and women.’

‘But why should your volunteers ever be a permanent feature, Colonel? We have an army and a police force and thousands of men in countless private security organisations - why should we need any more?’

‘The British Armed Forces are apolitical, Mr McCullin, with some exceptions, that is. That means they respond to, and take their orders from, whoever is the Government of the day. For nearly two decades now we have seen the fortunes of this country tossed around like a counter in roulette. The unions and the small group of evil-minded Communists who control them where they matter - on the shopfloor - have blackmailed this Government time and time again, careless about whether what they demand and get is good for the country, or even for the men they are supposed to represent.

‘They are part of an international conspiracy, Mr McCullin, a conspiracy against democracy - and at no time during the eighteen years that it’s been in power has this Government ever taken a cane to them. Never in the dozens of crippling national strikes has it ever used the armed forces . . . in the mines, the docks, the railways. Why? Because it daren’t, not because the army’s unwilling; the tail, Mr McCullin, has been wagging the dog too long!’

‘But you can’t seriously suppose that this Government would ever ask help from your volunteers or that they’d even allow you to intervene in an industrial dispute!’

‘Not this Government; no, you’re right. But this Government can’t continue in office forever. Pendulum politics has been in a vacuum, Mr McCullin, but the swing is on its way and God help them when it comes. We’ve been held to ransom by these Marxists and their masters in Moscow long enough.’

‘Isn’t there a law,’ Tom asked, ‘against the recruiting and training of a private army in this country. . . something that says you can’t do what you are doing?’

‘There is such a law. The Public Order Act, 1936. But we are working well within that law. We are doing nothing that is not being done by rifle clubs. Adult Education Colleges, even the CCF and bloody Boy Scouts! We’re a little late but we are what Mr Edward Heath’s Cabinet had in mind when they suggested their Civil Contingencies Unit in 1972/3. Something to fill the gap in the control the Government had when confronted by groups of workers who controlled vital areas of the economy - the miners, power and water workers - the dockers.’

From the right there was a rustle and Gosling reappeared through the brocade curtains. He walked straight to Haig, still not looking at Tom, and handed the notepad to the Colonel. Haig looked at it for a brief second, smiled up at Gosling and said. Thank you, my boy - exactly as I thought. Don’t go too far. I’ll call you shortly, /mother sherry, Mr McCullin, before we go? No? Then let’s be on our way.’

Haig led the way out of the house - a long and rambling stone building that had been converted from a rectory to a farmhouse shortly after the last war. New red brick and breeze-block buildings stood out ugly amongst the old cob and stone stables, cider presses and coach house. Beyond them, Tom could see men working and behind them twenty or more Friesian cows side by side in the long cowshed, steam rising from their backs in the cold air.

‘You seem to be self-sufficient here, Colonel!’

‘Have to be,’ Haig replied, striding ahead of Tom across the cobbled farmyard. ‘No point in setting yourself up as saviour and when the crunch comes find you’re dependent on someone else for food and drink.

‘We produce everything we need. One hundred and sixty-eight acres on this estate, and a good deal more productive per acre than any of the farms you’ll find round here. We’ve got every vegetable you’d find in town, and more besides; we produce our own milk, flour, beer, meat and bacon; fifty-four cows, eleven baby beef, four hundred and seventy chickens, sixty pigs - you name it, we’ve got it!’

Tom followed Haig, without comment, into a white painted single storey building on the right of the vegetable garden. It had been built from breeze block and plaster board. It was thirty or more yards long with a central corridor running between what were obviously classrooms. Each had twenty, possibly twenty-five pupils - men and women - all of them dressed in the same dark blue serge and flannel uniforms. The teacher standing at the front of each class was dressed in exactly the same way. There were no badges or markings to indicate the rank of anyone. The first class on the left as Tom passed was silent and reading; the next on the right was chanting . . . it might have been an arithmetic table or a formula or the conjugation of a foreign verb - Tom could not make out. Haig moved quickly ahead. He shouted over his shoulder, ‘Classes to suit them all. British Constitution and Sociology for the bright ones. Civil Defence for them all!’

He stopped just before he came to the end of the corridor in front of the swing doors marked EXIT, and pointed left and right. ‘These are the tutorial sessions - one tutor, one student - the “A” streamers if I can borrow a title from the present abominable system of proletarian education.’

Tom saw a dozen rooms, six each side of the corridor, tiny cubicles big enough to seat two people only, with a small foot-wide table dividing student and teacher. There were no doors to the cubicles but however hard he tried, Tom could hear only whispered conversations coming from them.

Haig said, ‘They are men and women who will be expected to take on the specialist jobs at a time of National Emergency. Where we can, of course, we’ll shunt them back to their own jobs . . . power workers, nurses, train drivers, mining foremen. . . you get the idea?

‘Their loyalty now,’ he indicated with a nod of his head the classes around him, ‘is to their country, which is as it should be at a time of National Crisis. In the fortnight we have them here, after careful vetting, let me say, we simply concentrate that patriotism and enable them to channel it in the right direction at the right time as British Volunteers.’

Haig was talking loudly. Tom realised this was his norm, and his voice carried and echoed down the narrow corridor. But no one, tutor or pupil, looked up or in any other way acknowledged Haig’s presence.

He smiled at Tom, nodding his head slightly, waiting perhaps for some kind of affirmation or a point of argument. But Tom said nothing - he found he couldn’t. This was something he hadn’t expected; never dreamt of. He was unprepared. It reminded him of the futuristic plays and films he’d seen on television, bored and drunk in his flat in Russell Street. But this was real! The people in those classrooms were actually listening and agreeing and contributing; declaring their loyalties to Haig and his system.

Haig moved through the swing doors making no attempt to hold them for Tom, only a yard behind. They crossed a small flagged courtyard; pots of geraniums were stacked in the comer, covered lightly with straw.

They passed through a storehouse where sacks were piled high marked GRAIN and GROUND FLOUR, then past the cowshed on the left and into a paddock.

Ahead of him Tom saw a hundred or so men in a single column, four abreast, trotting around the paddock’s perimeter which was bordered by a stone wall, four feet high. Above that a wire fence, three feet high. The paddock was surrounded on three sides by a wood of oak and beech and running through it Tom could see another fence, close-wire weave, at least seven feet high. He realised that as far as he could make out, the farm and its outbuildings could not be seen anywhere from outside the Estate. The fence in the wood probably ran to the main gate just a few yards back from the Totnes-Dartmouth road.

Nobody outside the Estate would easily get in, that was certain. And nobody inside would easily get out!

The men were running evenly and in perfect step. They were all dressed in dark blue singlets and track bottoms and their plimsolls were blancoed. Even on the move, Tom could see that their column was meticulously measured off by height in the old Service tradition.