The Partridge Kite (4 page)

Kellick gave the file to Fry and went into the kitchen. The sink revolted him. He pulled at the plug-chain. Grease from the cold washing-up water stuck to his hands and covered his wristwatch. It made him want to retch. He’d taken off his shoes but his socks were still wet and his feet were cold.

He was finding it hard to come to terms with all that he had heard in the past three days. He was very definitely an outer man, a good outer surface man: strong face, good voice, steel tips on the shoes man. And being in charge of Special State Operations had never troubled him before. He’d served a long apprenticeship and he’d never relied on luck to get on: which was fortunate because he’d never had even a mouse’s share of it.

He’d always coped because it was always so predictable.

But all that he’d learnt over the past seventy-two hours had shattered that comfortable feeling - the unpleasant combination of fighting an enemy at home with none of the usual let-outs available to him if things went wrong. He had eight years to go to retirement and a knighthood: he meant to enjoy both. A cock-up on a foreign could always be covered. There had been many before and here he was stronger than ever. But a cockup on this one would be hard to hide - he couldn’t expect to smother the Department’s recriminations. Balls this up, and he’d join the holdover list of senior civil servants waiting for a transfer. He walked back into the lounge just as Fry had finished listening to the radio news bulletin. He raised his eyebrows, nodding towards the set.

‘No,’ said Fry, ‘no developments. Same headlines, same blanks.’

Kellick said, ‘The Prime Minister wants us to employ our man through a third party, so there’s no trace-back to him. I can see his point, I suppose.’

‘He realised,’ Fry said, ‘that we must pick someone from our own files. How the hell are we expected to employ McCullin or anyone from the A.D. without his twigging he’s working for us?’

Kellick sat back on the sofa, pulled off his wet socks and began rubbing his feet and massaging the toes.

‘That’s the question. Fry,’ he said. ‘Now let’s have the answer!’

‘We did something of the kind with Bellinger last year, contracted him through a private detective agency that he occasionally worked for.’

‘Does McCullin string for a detective agency. Fry?’ ‘No!’

‘Then try and talk some bloody sense, for Christ’s sake!’ Kellick was tired and he never tried to hide his irritability with subordinates.

‘But we could invent one,’ Fry came back. ‘We could employ him - proper approach, above the table, so much a day, expenses plus, the usual way. And for cover we could make it a foreign-based agency.’

Kellick thought for a while. ‘We’d have to be very careful with our introduction.’

‘Yes, but we could be recommended to him via an old contact - one that is still with us.’

‘Of course!’ said Kellick. ‘Someone who has or has had proper access to the file but not anyone who had the authority to offer a contract direct.’ Kellick was warming to the idea. ‘What if we could find someone who had reason to help McCullin but who is duty bound to us
first. . .
no suspect loyalties?’

‘How about Mrs Cathcart?’

‘Exactly! Mrs Kate Cathcart, nee Bowes. Exactly right for us!’

‘Are they still involved with each other?’

‘No idea.’

‘If they are, we could have complications. McCullin might be frightened off. She could refuse to help.’

‘She can’t refuse. Fry, you know damn well she can’t. And why should McCullin scurry off? She’ll have nothing to do with the offer. She’ll just be the in-between girl, trying to help an old lover. They don’t have to meet if they don’t want to. All we need is her name and status to make her recommendation authentic. And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t take to the agency offer - our make-up men will take care of that! What is essential is that he accepts the first approach. We must concentrate our cunning on that. Fry!’

Fry moved to get his reversible blue-grey raincoat hanging on the back of the door, trying to ignore the puddle of rain that had gathered beneath it, gradually seeping into the pile of the cream Indian carpet. Kellick had seen it though, and quickly walked into the kitchen for a cloth with his usual fussiness.

‘Fry,’ he said, as he went down on one knee to wipe up the water, ‘have Cathcart in my office eleven Monday morning. Tomorrow would be better, of course, but Sundays are for emergencies only.’ It was one of his many standard glib phrases.

Both men looked at each other for the first time properly that evening. . . for emergencies only
. . .
they’d almost forgotten what it was all about; why they were there.

Kellick continued quickly, ‘You can begin groundwork tomorrow. Find out where McCullin is, what he’s been doing since he came back from Prague: check his bank balance, and find out what he’s been drinking recently: how much of it, too! Let me have it all before eleven on Monday in your handwriting. I shall want to be briefed before I see Cathcart.’

Fry opened the door, stuffing the A.D. file into his Samsonite briefcase.

‘And remember,’ Kellick said, ‘only four of us know anything about CORDON and Sanderson. It must stay that way until McCullin either stands it up or knocks it down. I’ll set up the cover story for Cathcart by the time I see you.’

Fry drove away along Prince of Wales Drive a few minutes past midnight. The man under the umbrella standing in the doorway at the next block of flats thirty yards along watched the red tail lights of Fry’s Range Rover swing left towards Chelsea Bridge, and disappear. He waited. Ten minutes later the lights of Kellick’s flat went out. Then the man too walked away towards the bridge and Chelsea to find a taxi. It was still raining.

Monday, 13 December

Tom McCullin was not a tidy man. Not unhygienic, hut scruffy. He would blame it as a reaction, in approaching middle age, to the regimentation of his youth: that and seven years of tidy Service life. His body was sagging, he’d say, but his mind would see him through!

He’d never married. And had he stayed in one place long enough he might well have fallen into the bachelor routine of tidiness in all things, slavishly obeying the first rule of survival for those living alone: never come home to the breakfast grouts and dishes. He knew the rule well enough but had never had the energy to keep to it. He knew the sight of cold breakfast leftovers, the greying sheets of an unmade bed, the smell of whisky glasses and saucers piled high with fag ends. Bad habits that had made many a man seek the safety and orderliness of marriage.

It wasn’t often that Tom came home to bedsitter chaos because more often than not he never came home at all. It was one of the Department’s fetishes that if off on a job - he could never call them ‘contracts’ and keep a straight face - an agent must never prepare to leave too obviously. There should never be a suitcase packed, no notes for the milkman. You must leave your accommodation - a Kellick word that, couldn’t find it in himself to call it a home - as if you were going out to buy a packet of tea.

Sure enough, it had always worked. Everything he needed was always waiting for him at the Department: he got most of his underwear free that way, the only payola that was ever available.

When he came back, his flat was always spick and span. The kitchen sink and the ashtrays were always empty, the beer stains had been washed out of the carpets and the bed linen was white, crisp and ironed in squares with the middle press mark dead centre of the mattress. He always felt, coming back after the grottiness of a job away, that it was New Year’s morning and someone had turned over a new leaf for him. It was a service he’d come to expect: the least the Department could do for him, pay the one pound eighty pence an hour for a decent char.

What he didn’t know was that it was a service the Department considered essential, and not for any reason of hygiene. For security reasons only. By the time Tom was sipping his first gin and tonic thirty-nine thousand feet up on his way to some foreign assignment, his flat had already been turned inside out. It was the Department’s way of satisfying itself that he had left nothing around that could embarrass them, should the flat be visited by people outside the British Government’s employ while he was away. It was also a necessary routine, sorting out his letters and papers, to be certain of Tom’s continued loyalty to his government and country: to be certain that he continued to carry his high security rating.

And recently he’d been blessed with yet another Departmental service. They paid all his bills for him. He’d now quite forgotten that spasm of panic every time he’d opened the front door to find an ominous pile of manilla envelopes scattered across the cold, empty hallway. It depended on his mood - that is before or after a Scotch - whether or not he would stuff them immediately into the waste bin, or some desk drawer he knew he was unlikely ever to open again. Sooner or later of course, after the solicitors’ warning notes and eventual court order had joined the rest in anonymity, the bailiffs would arrive threatening to take away silver, antiques and Persian rugs - of which Tom had none.

On one occasion an unfortunate man, recently retired from the Metropolitan Police and acting on behalf of the South-Western Electricity Board in a civilian capacity, told the magistrate at Wandsworth how the said Mr McCullin had split open the lobes of both his ears. He was still partially deaf. It happened in an argument over whether the electricity supply should be disconnected. Mr McCullin, the injured party told the magistrate, had clapped his hands together very fast and very hard. The bailiff’s head was painfully in between. The incident had upset the Department and payments had to be made to various court reporters to ignore these particular proceedings. The payment of Tom’s bills was now the responsibility of some minor clerk in the Department, sums later to be deducted from payments made to Tom and deducted in the same way that the cost of cleaning his flat was made - something Tom would also have known about had he ever bothered to look at the slip of paper that always accompanied his cheque.

It was mid-afternoon, Monday, and the red telephone on the floor in Tom’s bedroom had been ringing for nearly two minutes. Very few people had his number, and of that few only a handful would ring that long. Tom always let it ring long before he bothered to answer. When he was asked to explain why, he’d say that only callers who had something important to say or something equally important to ask would hang on that long. And Tom was only interested enough in the machine to use it for such reasons. He used much the same simple logic to explain why he kept his phone on the bedroom floor. If the phone rang during the day, he’d say, it was no bother walking to it.

He picked up the phone and listened. No name, no number, not even a hullo.

Tom, you are supposed to be here!’ A woman’s voice, ‘cultivated’ was how Tom always described it.

‘Christ!’ he said, ‘you only asked me a couple of minutes ago. Haven’t even got my pants on yet.’

Tom, I rang you at 11.30 this morning. It is now 1.30 and you’re still in bed!’

‘How the hell can you tell I’m still in bed?’

‘You have a different voice when you’re in bed,’ she said. ‘And I’m alone in bed too, if you…’

She interrupted. Tom, I don’t care who or what you have with you! The appointment was for one o’clock, Tom. I’m trying to help you! Some people I’ve had contact with over the years, officially through the Department, want someone in the trade to do a job for them unofficially. Nothing dangerous: well paid. He’s asked me. . .’

‘He?’

‘I met him in Stockholm during the Seven Nation Summit Conference years ago. He was in charge of some aspect of security there for the Swedes; now he runs his own agency. He wants a job done by someone we - that’s us, not you - can trust.’

‘What’s his name?’ Tom asked.

‘No name, Tom, not now. If you want the job - and you will when you know what he is paying - you had better take the trouble of getting up. When can you meet me?’

‘Kate,’ said Tom, ‘whenever we meet I always try to do things that make you say things that upset me.’ He scratched himself.

‘Tom! I’m serious. Yes or no?’

‘Okay. Where and when?’

‘In half an hour, at two o’clock. Wait at your window and come down when you see me. We’ll talk in the car.’

‘Just like old times, Kate! Can we park by the Serpentine and steam up the windows?’ But he was already talking to himself.

Kate Cathcart replaced the receiver and looked across to Kellick and Fry sitting on the opposite side - the host side - of the desk. Kellick put down the extension receiver and smiled across at her.

‘Thank you, Kate,’ he said. ‘Keep it just like that, fairly light for the time being. We mustn’t have him thinking it is anything more than a routine domestic check.’

‘And what
is
it, Mr Kellick?’ she asked. ‘What am I to ask him to do? Is it an A.D. contract?’

‘Kate!’ Kellick smiled again. ‘Remember what I told you this morning. For reasons that have been decided by people way above me I cannot tell you now. Maybe later, but I think most probably not.’

Kellick had a way, when talking about people ‘above him,’ of looking at his shoes, invariably black-soled Hush Puppies, so earnestly that you almost expected The People to rise out from under the dark stains on the suede uppers.

He went on, ‘You know, Kate, from your familiarity with the A.D. file that Tom is one of our better men. When he works for us he is paid a lot of money. When he works, that is, because I know that when he isn’t working for this Department he isn’t working at all. Not because he is lazy, which he undoubtedly is, but because there are few openings for his very special kind of skills. We are his only source of income. He is not pensionable, but with a little persuasion, a little pressure on certain people above me’ - again the shoes - ‘we might just manage to work him into one through some department or other.’

‘Mr Kellick,’ Kate said, ‘what you are trying to say to me is clear enough. You needn’t go on.’

But Kellick was enjoying it. He loved these departmental soliloquies.