Red Crystal (3 page)

The list was very short, fifteen names, if that, and consisted of speakers at the two meetings that Ryder himself had attended. He tried another tack.

‘What addresses have the two given?’ he asked Conway.

‘Home addresses. Reardon’s in Birmingham. The other bloke – Lampton – in Cheshire.’

‘What about occupations?’

‘Market stallholders.’

That was a new one on Ryder. ‘Oh, yes. What do they sell?’

‘Second-hand books, apparently.’

‘And they haven’t given a London address?’

Conway looked at his notes and shook his head.

So, no lead to the other demonstrators that way. Ryder asked without optimism, ‘Anything else to go on?’

Conway made a face. ‘Well, the dinner guests did offer some descriptions. For what they’re worth. You can imagine the sort of thing – student types, long hair, bearded, unkempt.
Really
helpful. But the assailant – the brick-lobber – was female, and the Oxford boys don’t seem to have got her in custody. The description’s a bit better.’ Conway read from his notes. ‘About twenty-five, long mousy hair, pale complexion, very thin, jeans, distinctive patchwork jacket covered in flowers.’

Ryder tried to fit the description to one of the names in the file, but couldn’t.

Nothing for it then. It was time to go out and about.

Ten-thirty on a Saturday night was not the best time to find informants. As he left the Yard, Ryder resigned himself to the fact that he was unlikely to find any of his regular sources until late in the night, if then.

He began at the Carlton Arms, a pub off Gower Street, near one of the London School of Economics’ halls of residence. Ryder had no trouble passing as a student. His fair wavy hair was down to his collar and he invariably wore jeans and an old denim jacket. He was twenty-six but could have been less. He had the classless anonymous look of a thousand other young men, which was just what he wanted.

The pub was crowded, mainly with students. But neither of the two men Ryder was hoping to see was there. He gave it ten minutes, until just before closing time, and hurried off to the Duchess of Teck nearby.

No one there either.

He didn’t like pressurizing his informants, and usually took care to make the whole process of giving information so casual that it was almost painless. But he needed those names.

Against his better judgement he went into a hall of residence off Endsleigh Place and asked for one of the men by name. Someone went to look for him. He was out. Ryder was almost relieved.

He found a callbox and phoned the flat where the second student lived. Also out.

It looked as though he’d have to wait until the next day.

Although there was always Nugent. He might be worth a try. Nugent had been at the LSE until he dropped out the previous year. He now lived on social security and, Ryder suspected, was heavily into drugs. Nugent lived in a flat in a rundown house in Upper Holloway and wasn’t on the phone. It was a long way to go on the off chance.

Ryder hesitated, then, with a small sigh, set off for King’s Cross to catch the Piccadilly Line north to Finsbury Park. It would probably be a wild goose chase, but at least he would have left no stone unturned.

It was shortly before midnight by the time he got to the decrepit house where Nugent lived. The front door was open. The sound of loud beat music echoed across the street. Inside there was a party going on. About a dozen people were draped around a purple-lit room, in various stages of intoxication. There was a strong smell of grass.

Nugent was sitting on the door, his lank Jesus-style hair falling forward over his face. He was smiling benignly. Ryder sat down beside him and raised his voice above the din. ‘Hi.’

Grinning stupidly, Nugent made a valiant effort to focus. With a sinking heart, Ryder realized Nugent was more than well away, he was totally gone.

When Nugent finally spoke, it was to utter a stream of gibberish that was hard to make out over the noise, but seemed to involve a forthcoming Ying-Yang uprising and an Inner Space Adventure. Ryder nodded sagely. Then, without much hope, he shouted in Nugent’s ear, ‘D’you know Paul Reardon or someone called Lampton?’

Nugent made an effort to concentrate. ‘Sure.’

‘Where do they hang out?’

Nugent’s eyes clouded over and took on a look that wasn’t so much far away as out of sight.

‘Who’re their friends?’ Ryder prompted.

‘Friends, man? Who’s got friends …?’ Nugent giggled and nodded his head in time to the music.

Ryder repeated the question. For a moment Nugent ignored it, then turned abruptly and, his eyes suddenly hard and bright, said distinctly, ‘Five smackers.’

Ryder thought: You’re not so high as you seem, my friend. He said, ‘Okay, but I’ll want addresses.’

Nugent grinned. ‘That’s all I got, man. Try a house in Manor Road, Kentish Town. Can’t remember the number … But the door’s sort of purple.’

‘Anything else?’

Nugent shook his head.

‘What about a girl? Thin, tall, fair-haired. Wears a jacket covered in flowers.’

Someone passed Nugent a joint and he drew on it deeply. Ryder waited. Eventually Nugent mumbled with bad grace, ‘Stephie. Same house, man.’

Ryder allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction, then paid Nugent his five quid. If the information was good, it was cheap at the price.

Gabriele turned over and closed her eyes more tightly, but the morning light was bright and intrusive and she knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep.

She had been dreaming of light, the light she had seen as a child: bright yellow summer light full of promise; the promise of fulfilments and pleasures and freedoms she could barely guess at, but which she knew with absolute certainty that she had to have. In the dream, however, the light was elusive, reduced to a few thin tantalizing shafts that managed to find their way between the heavy oppressive curtains in the front room of the house where she had grown up.

Then, as in the dream now, every detail of the room was vivid in her mind. The curtains and the dark furniture pressed in on her, claustrophobic, devoid of life or hope, exuding blank despair. Tea was on the table: scones and heavy cream cakes, a pot of tea for her parents, milk for her. A pervasive deadly quiet, the clock sounding unnaturally loud on the mantelpiece. Her father reading, her mother bent over her embroidery. No one saying a word. Then for some reason Gabriele started to cry – she couldn’t remember why – and her mother looked up in surprise. Gabriele asked for something – was it to go out and play? Or just to go for a walk? Or to be told a story? Or just to do something
different
? Whatever, the request was denied. With quiet and relentless patience her mother explained that the next day was a schoolday and she must rest.

And then the silence had closed in again, like a shroud.

Even now Gabriele tensed at the memory of her feelings: the intense frustration, the voiceless rage, the corrosive loneliness.

With an effort she pushed the memory out of her mind.

Opening an eye, she looked at her watch. Not even eight, and she hadn’t got to sleep till three. She murmured ‘Hell’, and sat up naked on the edge of the bed. She reached for a towel and, wrapping it round herself, padded slowly out of the room.

Another memory nagged at her mind. Last night. The red-stained dress, the bleeding head. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Not happy anyway.

The kitchen was a mess. Glasses, bottles, saucers of ash lay everywhere. They’d talked for a long time last night. Then Stephie and Max had had a row – she couldn’t even remember what it was about – and Max had stormed out. Gabriele wondered if he’d returned.

Her private supply of instant coffee was still behind the fridge where she’d hidden it. She looked in the cupboard for the muesli she’d bought the previous day. The packet was there. Empty. That was the trouble with living in a commune – people were apt to share things. The muesli wouldn’t have been any good anyway – there was no milk. She settled for the coffee, strong and black.

Upstairs she tapped lightly on Stephie and Max’s door and looked in. Stephie lay curled up in the bed alone. No Max. It must have been a big row.

Stephie was still fast asleep. Gabriele closed the door and went back to her own room. Tuning her transistor to Radio 4, she lay on the bed. The carefully enunciated voice of a BBC presenter talked about farming. An establishment voice. An audible reminder to the lower orders that the ruling class existed and was still firmly in control.

While she waited for the next news summary, she turned the radio down a little and, pulling a suitcase from under the bed, opened it and took out a book. She kept all her books in the case, otherwise they got borrowed and never returned.

She got back into bed and started to read. The book was entitled
The Revolutionary Society
and its author was an Italian philosopher named Petrini. She had already read the book twice. But there were still a number of passages she very much wanted to read again.

From the first reading, Petrini’s ideas had impressed her deeply. He had taken the outworn ideas of the old left, discarded those that were flawed or unworkable, and advanced those which were manifestly based in truth. His observations, his logic, his conclusions were faultless. He had made that great leap of the imagination which took his theories beyond the half-baked ideas of the past, to a series of brilliantly original truths that actually related to people’s needs.

Society was structured, according to Petrini, to serve the capitalist system … The establishment controlled the people’s very existence … People were not seeing the real world, but what they had been trained to see. They were encouraged to want material things, TV sets, cars and washing machines, because those things effectively subdued them. Their time was filled with empty repetitive pursuits to stop them from thinking …

This was all so true that Gabriele could only shake her head and wonder why she’d never realized it before.

The way forward was not to improve the present structure, but to replace it. People needed to rediscover the world as a physical sensual extension of themselves, and to realize they need not be cogs in the machinery of a harshly unnatural and alien world.

To achieve this, all institutions – schools, universities, factories – had to be subverted, so that people would question the existence of those institutions, and see the truth.

Gabriele marked her favourite ideas with a pencil and turned over the corners of the pages, so that she could find them more easily. There was one particular passage that she kept returning to.

It said: ‘The way forward for the political activist is to sharpen and crystallize attitudes on the two sides of capitalist society. The social contradictions must be exaggerated, so that people are able to see them for the first time.’

Contradictions must be exaggerated.

Sharpen and crystallize.

Gabriele liked those phrases. It was what the demonstration had been about – hardening attitudes to Vietnam, getting some action. Yes: sharpen and crystallize. She underlined the words twice.

The voice on the radio had changed. She turned it up. The end of a programme. Finally, the news.

It was the third item. There had been a violent demonstration at a dinner in a hotel in Oxford. The US ambassador had been slightly injured … Another man still in hospital … Five people charged.

Gabriele’s first feeling of elation at making the national news evaporated. They hadn’t mentioned the
point
of the demonstration. Typical of the Establishment to conceal the facts. She thought bitterly: I should have known. She turned off the radio with an angry snap.

At least the man with the bleeding head hadn’t been badly injured or they’d have said so. And as for Pete and Paul, they’d be okay. They’d get bail and be charged with causing a breach of the peace or whatever the quaint terminology was. There’d be a fine and a reprimand. And that would be that. No great deal. In fact, rather a feather in their caps. Neither of them would give away any names, of that she was sure. It was just bad luck – or good luck, depending on the way you looked at it – that they’d been the ones to get caught.

She heard a sound and looked up sharply.

A tall black man stood in the doorway. She relaxed. ‘Hello, Tobago. Didn’t know you were here.’

‘Just short of a bed. So I helped myself to a mattress last night. Hope it was okay.’

She nodded, ‘Sure.’ Tobago was currently homeless and, when the pressures of the temporary accommodation the council had fixed up for him and his four-child family became too much, he grabbed a mattress on the floor somewhere. He knew where the spare key was hidden, underneath the dustbins round at the back.

‘So, what’s the news?’ she asked.

Tobago came in and sat on the end of the bed and she settled back and half-listened to the long involved story of his struggle with the incomprehensible local authority system.

Suddenly a loud knock sounded on the front door below. Gabriele frowned. Who could it be at this hour on a Sunday?

She said, ‘Go and see to it, would you, Tobago? And if it’s anyone wanting help, tell them to come back later.’

He went out, pulling the door behind him. She heard him padding softly down the stairs and opening the door.

There were voices.

She sat up, very still, very tense.

A shout and the sound of feet …

Alarmed, she jumped out of bed and looked for something else to put on. There was no time. She could hear
dozens
of feet now, hammering up the stairs. Hastily she pulled the towel more tightly round her and tied the ends into a knot.

The door burst open and Tobago came in. ‘It’s the fuzz!’

She pushed past him and looked out of the door.

Men were streaming up the stairs, running purposefully. Already they were barging into the upper rooms.

Retreating into the bedroom, Gabriele slammed the door and stood there, panting with rage. She should do something. But
what
?

Tobago murmered, ‘Shit, I don’t need this—!’

The door opened with a bang and two tall figures stood in the doorway.