The Partridge Kite (15 page)

He went over to the comer of Kellick’s office to a large old mahogany table covered in dark red Moroccan leather, cracked with age and peeling off at the comers. Kellick kept two newspaper files there for his own reading and reference.
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph.
Fry turned over three back copies and found the item, two paragraphs long, tucked away at the bottom of page four.

A non-commissioned part-time instructor with the Pewsey Detachment of the Wiltshire Army Cadet Force has been suspended from duty ‘pending full consideration of his alleged involvement with Column 88’. This was announced by Mr Rodgers, Minister of State for Defence, in the Commons yesterday.

His announcement comes after press investigations into exercises carried out by Column 88, a Right-Wing organisation, in the Savernake Forest, near Marlborough, last year.

Tom nodded as Fry finished reading aloud. He turned to Kellick.

‘You see their style, Mr Kellick.’

‘Yes, I think I’m beginning to, McCullin.’ But Kellick’s voice was toneless, it lacked enthusiasm. Something is missing from Kellick today, thought Tom, and I’d bloody well like to know what it is.

‘You’ve got half a dozen or so anti-immigrant groups blatantly racist and some of them bloody vicious,’ Tom said aloud.

‘And a fair number of Right-Wing clubs, too,’ said Fry.

‘The Thursday Club, the British Military Association, the Club of Twelve; there’s one in particular we’ve been keeping our eye on for some time now, the Knights of St George. . . a club for Right-Wing hardliners. . . all military men.’

There was a light knock on the door and Mrs Hayes entered. Without a word Kellick took a folder from her and without a word she turned and went back to her one-bar electric fire and the tiny room that smelt of face powder.

Kellick cleared his throat. ‘During the past three years up until 17 December today, there are registered in this country twenty-seven Nationalist Parties. Many of them have different manifestos of course, but they all share the creed you have in mind, McCullin. And funds registered in the same period total eighteen. Again, McCullin, all sharing similar ethnic, xenophobic and cultural beliefs.’

‘You mean they’re bloody racist Right Wingers!’ Tom hated the cosmetics of the sociologists. He found also he was beginning to be impatient with Kellick. He believed in calling a spade a spade. . . unless of course the spade happened to be black!

‘News-Information,’ Kellick went on, ignoring Tom’s comment, ‘also points out that during that same period, four new magazines have appeared on the market. Two fortnightly, two monthly. They are expensively produced glossies and come from the same publishers. . . Longvilles.

They say that many of the parties and funds they’ve mentioned regularly advertise for members and money in all four magazines. They also draw our attention to the nature of many of the articles and the sentiments expressed in their leader columns.’

‘Who owns Longvilles?’ asked Tom.

They’ve checked that out too,’ said Kellick. ‘Despite its size Longvilles is still a privately owned family company. Held jointly by Stephen, Rowland and Anthony Mostyn.’

The hall was not large but upwards of a thousand people had crammed and eased their way into it.

The previous night it had been hired out to the local branch of the National Federation of Small Shopkeepers and some of their banners still hung from the walls, advertising the virtues of the comer shop and the vices of Value Added Tax.

But the people here tonight were not interested in the dilemmas of the small shopkeeper. Tonight they were concerned with the Big Business of Reform. The business of ‘Making Britain New Again’.

It was a meeting by invitation only and at the front door, which opened on to the pavements of Kingsway WC2, large young men with neat haircuts and ‘Stewards’ badges pinned to the lapels of their neat dark suits vetted people as they came in, politely and very thoroughly. Another group of neat young men stood at the double swing doors that separated the entrance foyer from the main hall, making second checks at random just as politely and just as thoroughly.

Tom had no trouble getting through. The ticket given him by the Department’s make-up men had been an excellent forgery. He sat down at the far side of the hall, level with the low balcony and about thirty feet from the stage.

Everything was very orderly and quiet. It was as if the people here had done it a hundred times before together. It felt and looked to Tom like a small-time constituency meeting. The only noise, other than the low hum of conversation, was the stamping of feet in the entrance foyer as people shook the snow from their shoes.

Above Tom in a row were twelve gas heaters, to keep the temperature of the hall above freezing. Overcoats remained buttoned-up, men dug their chins deep into the warmth of the woollen scarves around their necks already damp with snow and the drips from their noses. The experienced had brought rugs and foot mufflers.

Smiles and nods of recognition were exchanged around the floor but little by little conversation dried up.

The stage was bare except for a table, itself bare. No drapes, no banners, no flowers. On one side of it a slim microphone . . . omnidirectional, and powerful. On each side of the stage were two speakers, one on the boards, the other set high suspended by steel wire from the ceiling. In the far right-hand corner a sound engineer sat by an amplifier. The equipment was expensive, and in the drabness of the hall it looked out of place. But it was perfectly suited for the job; it was professional. It was exactly their style.

There was an end to the shuffling and stamping in the foyer. Tom heard bolts drawn across the front door. Then the single heavy black cotton curtain was pulled across the swing doors as the last of the stewards came in. He joined the others sitting on a bench, backs to the wall, facing the audience.

There was a silence. There had been no announcement, there was no programme . . . nothing to indicate the timetable. But almost as if they had been rehearsed by a floor manager they became silent. It was like the beginning of a concert as leader and conductor look at each other seconds before the first bar.

Tom looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. The Christmas meeting of the Central London branch of the Fight for Freedom Fund was about to begin.

But they had not come to sing carols tonight. They had come to listen to their own Messiah, one of many who were at that moment about to begin similar meetings throughout the country - apostles of the New Order.

He walked from the back of the hall slowly and with the professional’s sense of drama and timing. He climbed the four steps to the stage looking directly ahead of him. Not a tall man, not impressive in his looks. He had a small clipped moustache, possibly dyed black. His hair was also black, again too black to be natural for a man of his age. He must have been sixty; might well have been older but he was certainly no younger.

He was dressed in a dark suit, the same tailor, Tom thought, as used by the polite young bouncers sitting over by the wall. The darkness of the suit highlighted the man’s skin. It was the whitest skin Tom had ever seen. No blemishes, no shadows or shades of colour in the face and hands. Didn’t people take small doses of arsenic once to make their skin so white? Everything about him was black except for the shoreline of white as his hands left his sleeve cuffs and his face met his hair.

He turned at the table and stood a foot from the stand microphone facing his audience. The effect on them was extraordinary.

Tom looked about him. They sat, a thousand of them, perfectly still, their faces eager, their eyes wide open, expectant. They seemed to be willing him to speak.

Five minutes ago they had looked so very ordinary. Tom had walked the pavements with them, eaten in nasty, shiny chain restaurants with them, crammed into tube trains and lifts with them. They were people with neat little semis in Barnet and Barking, who grew tomatoes and broad beans in the vacant patches around the roses in their neat little gardens. They were the staid, easy to please, kind, boring, never-make-love-with-the-light-on, always have a joint on a Sunday, ducks on the wall, clichéd yeomen of England, people.

And here they were, behind locked doors, frozen to their marrow, quietly waiting, anxious to soak up the vicious racist neo-Nazi propaganda of John Hamilton Linklater, the fourth name on Tom’s list.

The seventeen eight-by-ten photographs were arranged on Kellick’s desk. They showed, as the Department’s photographer had warned, little more than shadows and profiles, but helped by the photographer’s own first-hand description the prints were certainly recognisable.

The profile of the assassin who’d pushed Reginald Scam- mill down the escalator in Leicester Square station and dragged Mr Brown, the Department’s tail, under a London Transport bus was clearly defined. Kellick and Fry were well pleased despite the lack of detail.

It was Fry who saw the tie.

By chance, a light source, possibly a group of candles, had highlighted an area just below the man’s chin to about level with the second button of his waistcoat. Had the light shone six inches higher, the whole face would have been clearly recognisable. Six inches lower - nothing.

‘The tie has a kind of broken stripe, a zig-zag pattern. I know it’s only black and white but there seem to be two shades. Could be the RNVR.’

‘More likely the Royal Artillery,’ said Kellick, clearly impressed again with Fry’s eye for detail.

‘Get Photos to blow up this section of tie and also die ear. Then send them to Warner of Army Liaison. I want the regiment and the name and background of anyone, with officer rank that is, who fits that description. Then check the monitoring of Linklater’s speech -1 trust you’ll have more than one pickup source this time. And have the recordist who’s monitoring the GPO line on 405 begin the second Linklater stops speaking. This lime we are going to have that telephone number if we have to record every single call on that exchange.’

Fry was called back to Kellick’s office within the hour. It was, as Kellick had guessed, a Royal Artillery tie and a series of confidential checks, speeded by the authority of the Senior Officer Military Liaison SSO, quickly established from the Ministry of Defence Army Records the identity of die man with the moustache and cauliflower ear.

Kellick looked pleased as Fry sat down.

‘Positive ident. Fry . . . no doubt about it. He left the Army seven years ago, rank of Major, serving as Adjutant to General George Meredith. After two years on the beat he took up a scholarship at Bramshill College and has soared to promotional success ever since.

‘He still wears his regimental tie but Major Robert Menzies is not in the Army any more. He’s a superintendent. He’s a bloody policeman. Fry, and he’s stationed at Cannon Row!’

The applause was rapturous. He was telling them everything they wanted to hear.

They had listened to it many times before, even to him before, but the message, the battle cries, the shibboleths, rang as true and clear, as fresh and vital as if they were hearing them for the very first time.

John Linklater, Professor of Political Science, Reader in Psychology, propagandist and orator extraordinaire, CORDON Area Director for Lancashire, made it all sound so reasonable. He publicly justified with clarity and simple logic so many of the prejudices they had secretly been ashamed of. Thoughts they had seldom shared even with their wives. Only occasionally, with a remark, careless, incensed or drunk, did they ever approach the outskirts of the anger Professor Linklater was now endorsing up there on the stage in front of them. He shared their outrage and he justified it.

He was a prolific writer of books and articles but he’d not become popular in print. His words were dry on paper; the simplicity of his arguments seemed trite. His mastery was the spoken word. He had a way of slow and deliberate enunciation that could sometimes be almost flamboyant and he had a taste for stark options, always presenting his audiences with final chances.

As he spoke, his eyes moved slowly along the rows of dedicated listeners. He singled out one person or a group, and spoke to them directly, intensely, as if no one else should hear. He talked to them for one minute or five until he had won them completely and then he moved on. An old trick of public persuasion that seldom failed.

He had been speaking for over an hour, and although he was still composed, his skin still white without the suspicion of excitement or strain, his delivery began noticeably to speed up. He dabbed his forehead and lips with a large white handkerchief he kept tucked in his left cuff.

He paused and took a deep breath.

‘What is the temper of this country now? What is your mood? A mood of desperation? A mood for change? . . . A change of government before change becomes forever impossible. Forbidden?

‘How would the mass of British people respond to a new kind of government? A strong government that represents us. . . you and me and the millions of our kind?

‘Would you object, for example, to a government that closed the air and seaports to immigrants once and for all? That said enough is enough?

‘And repatriation? Have we really, finally, resigned our’ selves to a multiracial Britain? Is that why we survived nearly two thousand years as an Island race? Is that why one and a half million of our men, fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, died in the mud of France and Belgium, in the sands of Northern Africa, in the jungles of Burma? So that we should open our doors for all time to illiterate diseased
Muslims
and the hoodlums of Jamaica and Trinidad?

‘We are now forbidden by Law, under penalty of imprisonment, to object publicly. We, ordinary decent people, must talk softly behind locked doors about such matters. It is today criminal, my friends, to question the destiny of our land.’

His voice suddenly became a whisper but the sound engineer spread it to every comer of the hall. It was a personal whisper to everyone there. He said slowly, ‘And This-Is-Our- Land!’ He paused. The handkerchief again.