1990 (21 page)

'I thought the
Celtic
was full of our worthwhile people?' Skardort probed.

'Nine out of ten passengers are civil servants,' the other confirmed. 'It's the crew that's up to no good. They got fourteen illegals out last trip.'

'And how many have they bunged in the rats' quarters this time?' was the next query.

The officer drew himself to attention and asserted, proudly, 'Reason to believe, sir, twelve, with more to board. I'd like to be there when we ferret 'em out.'

But Herbert Skardon shook his head. 'I have something more urgent and important, Jack. Total warrant.' He made an exception and poured a drink for his subordinate. 'Name Kyle mean anything?'

'The hack?' Nichols took the glass and looked suitably flattered.

'Full strip off,' instructed his boss. 'Down to the fig leaf.'

'I'd have thought that a job for the Culture Inspectors,' the Emigration Officer remarked. 'What's Tony Judd going to say?'

Skardon instantly regretted the drink. 'I'm Controller here, Jack,' he snapped. 'Leave Judd to me. He didn't hold back when those illegals were getting out with the National Theatre Company. Now
you
can have one on a plate. Officially, you're looking for evidence that Kyle's into the emigration rackets.'

'And he's not?' Nichols was thorough, but endowed with limited intelligence.

'No, he's been nosing into the private enterprises of our Minister of Trade, the Right Honourable Nigel Burdon, Privy Councillor et cetera.'

'But that's not what my search warrant's about?' The Emigration Officer said, doggedly.

'You've got it!' Skardon confirmed with relief, then walked up to stand directly in front of the man, in order to spell it out. 'I don't want Kyle yelling blue murder to the hacks of the world's Press about jack-boots marching down Fleet Street, any more than I want even a hint that Kyle's been digging dirt about our spotless Minister of Trade.'

'But we
are
after Burdon?' Nichols was beginning to look like an enthusiastic beagle, eyes brightening, jowels quivering and nose damp.

'After, being the word. After Kyle,' Skardon decreed, carefully. 'I want Kyle. I need him badly, Jack. Legs wide open. And I don't want him in the martyrs' hall of fame. I want him to pay us respect. I want evidence that he's just a grasping mercenary. I want him nailed once and for all.'

'Right away?' His man looked a little less keen.

Skardon nodded.

'Only I was planning to see North Region play Moscow Dynamo in the New Europe Cup in Manchester before our snatch at Southampton.'

The PCD Controller returned deliberately to his desk, placed both hands heavily on it and leaned forward. 'Violent sport, soccer,' he said at last, very slowly. 'They break shins, don't they, Jack?'

There was no mistaking the menace.

They hardly bothered to knock. Just a token rap before pushing into the office and crossing to the filing cabinets next to Marly's desk. Jack Nichols stood stolidly in the doorway, as his men began rummaging in the drawers.

'Who are you?' Marly jumped to her feet.

'PCD, Ma'am.' He was officially polite.

'No!' she cried, moving towards the intruders.

'Miss, then,' he smirked.

'Citizen 6392244,' she corrected, in an unshaken Northern accent. 'And these files are confidential.'

'Nice number you've got.' He became ingratiating.

She locked the second filing cabinet briskly and stood against it, a small, staunch, middle-aged woman refusing to be bullied.

One of the PCD men tried to snatch the key from her, pushing her against the wall as he did so.

'Leave her alone, Murray,' his leader ordered in a tough voice, indicating to the other to deal with that particular cabinet. The man produced a miniature thermal lance and began work, forcing the lock with little effort.

Frightened now, though hiding it successfully, Marly returned to her desk with dignity and picked up the telephone. Tiny Greaves entered the room at that moment.

'You bloody pigs!'

'I could have you charged for that insulting remark about His Majesty's officers, Greaves,' the Chief Emigration Officer bridled, guarding the authority of his position with a paranoid aggression resulting from a lifetime of affronts from the public.

The huge news editor viewed him as though he was a maggot in a dung heap and drawled, 'Charge me then.'

Jack Nichols' eyes slid away towards Marly, who had buttoned out a number.

'If that's Kyle you're calling, I hope you find him,' he snarled, sarcastically. 'He's the original vanishing man.'

His subordinates were turning out the files, flipping through each, then shaking the contents carelessly onto the floor, their search deliberately wanton and malicious.

The number rang out at the other end of the line. It stopped and the secretary heard Delly Lomas answer, 'Highgate Special Line twenty two...' before she asked for her boss.

Then his voice, 'Yes, Marly.'

She looked helplessly at the chaos of papers now covering her office floor and her voice trembled. 'The PCD are here. Your papers...it's vandalism.'

'All right, Marly,' he responded, reassuringly. 'There's nothing in that room to interest
them
.'

'They're ruining our files!' she exclaimed in agitation.

'Put the fattest pig on the line, love,' he directed in a calm tone, which belied his protective rage over her distress.

They had worked together for many years and he had learnt to admire her perfectionism, and respect her extensive knowledge of the newspaper business. Bank managers, bores and bigots were kept at bay by her and he had never heard her sound alarmed before. She gave him total loyalty and now, when she needed his in return, he felt ashamed at being discovered socialising with a PCD Deputy Controller.

'Kyle?' A man's voice queried the line. 'Inspector Nichols here.'

'Emigration?' He was taken aback.

'I have total warrant, Kyle.'

'You usually do!' the journalist exploded, throwing down the receiver and whirling to face Delly Lomas. 'You keep me here while your animals wreck my office. Lovely lady!'

'I don't know what you're on about,' she frowned, baffled. 'You're here because you had too much wine last night.'

He had crossed the room and snatched his jacket. 'You can't miss the 1990 award.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Bitch of the Year!' he spat and slammed from the room.

Immediately, she pressed a red button on the phone, the direct line to the Controller's office. Within seconds he was replying, coldly, 'Yes, Miss Lomas. I authorised it...'

'Without reference,' she pointed out, justifiably annoyed. 'Kyle's my responsibility.'

'And normally with my kind regards, Miss Lomas,' he agreed, levelly. 'But not this time. Nichols has a job to do.'

'Nichols? We have something on Kyle over illegals?' Something was up! What was it she wondered to herself.

'Not yet,' Skardon was saying, gropingly, as though making up his answer as he went along. 'I have Nichols in mind for the third Deputy Controller post alongside you and Tasker. I'm trying him out on something other than Emigration Control.'

'That's the real reason?' Not believing a word of it. What had happened in her absence? Tasker! It had to be one of Tasker's moves.

'I think you'd best come in,' the Controller instructed and hung up abruptly.

Delly put the phone down slowly and lit a cigarette. She looked unusually apprehensive.

By the time Kyle reached his office, the PCD squad was already on its way out of London, Jack Nichols driving the high-powered official car hard down the motorway.

'People can stay too long hugging a desk at Centre, Evans,' he observed to the man beside him. He was full of a sense of achievement over the morning's work. Even that gross, insolent news editor had been forced to acknowledge his control. It was good to show trouble-makers like him who held the essential power. 'Give me the real thing like this any time.'

'More fun, yes, sir,' the man beside him agreed. 'But they should give us uniforms.'

'You're an emigration officer, Evans. A cut above Customs,' asserted his superior. 'Look what uniforms have done for Customs officers. People hate 'em.'

'And us, sir,' Evans commented, recalling Greaves' instinctive outburst.

Nichols overtook a couple of trundling vehicles with panache. The PCD van carrying the rest of his men and equipment was trailing behind. He smiled. 'When they know who we are.'

'Oh indeed, sir,' the official agreed, settling comfortably into the passenger seat and watching signposts to suburban towns off the motorway flash by. 'Much farther?'

'Twelve miles or so.'

Like Jack Nichols, Evans felt slightly exhilarated. The two men could not wait to do their duty.

Meanwhile, following their visit to his office, Kyle had begun helping Marly to restore order and was biting his lip in suppressed fury as he noticed her fighting tears and rummaging aimlessly amid the debris. Currents of violence shook him. He wanted to smash somebody, beat them up and kick them to pulp. Anybody.

Tiny Greaves walked into the office, looking hopeless.

'And where did our brave Editor-in-Chief cower?' the columnist quizzed him malignantly about their boss. 'In the loo?'

'Out late last night, at dinner with the Minister of Information. In late this morning,' the news editor replied.

'I'm writing this up. He'd better run it,' the other declared, grabbing a handful of crumpled and torn letters.

'He won't. He can't. No way, Kyle,' Greaves answered. 'Nichols served us with a G Notice forbidding publication under the rule protecting persons under suspicion.'

'That's me!' snapped the thwarted journalist.

Greaves rested against one of the tipped out filing cabinets, which creaked in protest, and drummed his fingers on the metal. 'They're protecting you from yourself, Kyle. You can't write a line about this in your own interest.' He shook his head sympathetically at Marly, now kneeling over the havoc on the floor. 'Our pens aren't mightier than their sword, Kyle. They're bloody water pistols. I was a pacifist till this morning.'

After he had gone, Kyle and his secretary worked together steadily and in silence, the woman gradually growing more composed through the monotony of the job.

'So what did they take that's any more use than loo paper?' he asked with a wink, pleased to see her relax at last.

'Your notes on the Government's plans for a safe power base in case of insurrection,' she replied, looking a little anxious again.

He shrugged. 'I've printed all that. And the notes gave away no contacts.'

'I don't think they were looking for anything,' she admitted, switching off the electric kettle and pouring them both a well-deserved cup of government issue coffee. 'They just came as frighteners.'

'They were doing what they call in their evil trade a strip-off, Marly,' he explained. 'But they could have been after my notes on our Minister of Trade.'

She looked happy. 'They'd not find them here, would they?'

He smiled back, with affection. 'No, you're a clever woman.'

She produced a packet of biscuits from her drawer and laid them with a flourish on the desk, picking up the phone before its first ring had ended. 'Mr Kyle's office...your wife.'

The columnist sighed as he took over. 'Yes.'

'I think you'd better come home, Jim,' Maggie Kyle's voice, said.

'What's wrong now?' he asked, irritably, then suddenly understood. 'Not the bloody PCD?'

'Them,' she confirmed, then paused, as though catching her breath. '...the Pigs, Clowns and Devils in person. I've only once asked you to come home before, Jim. We need you here now. Preferably with a carpenter and maybe a builder for all I know.'

He could hear the sound of hammering in the background. 'I'm on my way...' he stressed, hanging up and turning unseeing to Marly. 'Bastards!'

'Not there as well!' she exclaimed. 'Poor Maggie.' He had already collected his briefcase and coat. 'Time you went there, anyway,' she added. 'You've not been home for nearly two weeks.'

Kyle brushed a friendly hand across her hair. 'Get Dave Brett to meet me on the way. Same place as usual...' He studied her for a second, noticing the eyes over bright with tears. 'Maybe Tiny's right.'

'What?'

'Words are water pistols,' he said bitterly.

Darkly attractive, intelligent and cool, Maggie Kyle surveyed the PCD men ripping up the floorboards in her living room. The well-worn carpet had been rolled up and dumped in the garden. Jack Nichols was examining the interior of the piano with deep suspicion, as though expecting to discover a cache of grenades strapped behind its strings. Most of the books which lined the far wall, were already scattered on the floor.

'My husband would hardly keep files under the floorboards,' Kyle's wife said, coldly.

'You'd be surprised where people try to hide things. And we're after more than files,' the Chief Emigration Officer pronounced, weightily. 'Krugerrands, sovereigns, any loot they may have given him for getting illegal emigrants out.'

'And pigs may fly,' she retorted, unimpressed. 'Except your kind.'

The muscles round his jaw tightened and he systematically depressed every note on the piano, to make sure it played, before beginning, 'if we do find Krugerrands...'

'You'll have brought them,' she snapped. Then catching sight of Bevan, her twelve-year-old son, standing scared and appalled in the doorway, added with scorn, 'Do you get a deodorant allowance?'

Nichols turned his back and busied himself with the rest of the books. 'We're only doing our job, Mrs Kyle. Some persons offer us tea and toast.'

The boy ran off and Maggie contemplated the rising pile of books. 'Do you also burn them?'

'Not yet, Ma'am,' he replied, with edge; then jerked his head at one of the men, directing, 'Find his study.'

She asked, 'You will be replacing these floorboards?'

'Not necessarily, Ma'am' he answered, with a sneer. 'It depends on how helpful you are.'

The other PCD inspector had reached the door but suddenly stopped in his tracks and retreated rapidly back into the room. Kyle's son, Bevan, appeared looking white and determined and aiming a shotgun straight at him.