The Partridge Kite (24 page)

‘Kellick did some research that first evening when he met the Prime Minister with Sanderson’s tape. For some reason Kellick didn’t tell me about it and I only came across it yesterday, looking through his stuff in the office.

‘Well, according to Kellick’s notes. Lemmings broke his neck skiing. No foul play, the coroner said, though his body wasn’t found for four days.

‘Snag was, Tom - and Kellick in his notes underlined this - he hadn’t been staying anywhere locally. It was assumed by the local police that Lemmings had been on his way into Aviemore from somewhere else.’

‘So Lemmings was staying with a shepherdess. Fry. It doesn’t prove that. . .!’

‘The body was finally brought down by a woman skier, actually towed down on his skis, it was so frozen. The woman said the body had been buried in a snow drift and she’d only stopped because she’d seen the skis nearby.

‘Lemmings died, Tom, four thousand feet up on the Cairngorms, two miles from any of the usual runs.’

‘And you’re going to tell me that the woman who brought the body down was. . .’

‘Elsa Pilkington!’

Tom said nothing for a while. Then, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I did an awful lot of reading in Kellick’s office yesterday; the piece about Lemmings was just a little bit of it all. It wasn’t important until now. It wasn’t relevant until Elsa’s name clicked. But it makes sense all of a sudden, doesn’t it?’ ‘Is that why she was so desperate?’ Tom said. ‘Dead or alive, she would point the way? Is that why she tried to destroy herself?’ He continued, ‘They killed Lemmings because he wanted to get out. But then no one found the body and it had to be found because how else would the other faint hearts be warned? So they waited four days and then they had to send up the only person who knew where the body was. And the only person capable of bringing it down.’

‘One last thing, Tom.’

‘Try me. I’m becoming receptive all of a sudden.’

‘What if it could be established that Lemmings was not staying anywhere around Aviemore when he disappeared? You’d expect him to - it is the ski centre. What if he was on his way in from somewhere else, as the police thought possible? What if he was trying to ski his way out of CORDON and they caught up with him and broke his neck?’

They continued looking at each other for a full thirty seconds. Slowly Tom began to nod his head. It was as if Fry was offering him final convincing proof by telepathy.

‘Do you know what else Kellick once said?’ he asked.

‘Go on.’

‘“Fry”’ - Tom tried to affect Kellick’s stem clipped upper-class accent - “‘sometimes I find your powers of recall quite frightening!”’

Fry smiled for the second time in their ten-day association. ‘And,’ Tom said, ‘he was bloody well right!’

Fry actually began laughing.

The pilot’s hand reached back between the seats to the radio set. He changed the radio frequency to London’s Heathrow approach. A voice crackling from the speaker in the headlining answered the pilot’s call with runway, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and other aircraft in the vicinity.

The light plane buffeted through the cloud, yawing violently as it dropped towards the runway and the funnel of red fights below. The manual undercarriage release clanged against the panel and three tiny green lights flickered on in a triangle.

They hit the tarmac on one wheel and then the other, bouncing from side to side. Heavy slush from the melting snow hit the underside of the fuselage as the pilot began braking. The voice from the speaker confirmed landing time as 2357 hours and wished them goodnight.

They walked through the snow to the Department’s car waiting by the hangar and waved the pilot goodbye. He, in the bonhomie of the season, shouted back a ‘Merry Christmas!’ to them.

‘Just one thing, Tom.’

Fry spoke across the top of the Department’s car, silhouetted in the yellow lights of the hangar.

‘What do we do with the last two names? Do we check

them out or do we go straight to Scotland?’

‘We go quickly through with the routine,’ Tom said. ‘Not for them or the numbers. They don’t matter any more, even if CORDON was still giving them, which I doubt. But if we stop now they’ll know we’re moving. And they’ll move, too.’

‘Who’s next?’

‘Wilde. Evil bastard. Odd habits. Does strange things to himself.’

‘Oh! Mr McCullin, that’s the message.’ The Department’s driver spoke from the front seat as Tom and Fry got in and slammed the back doors together.

‘What message?’

‘It came through on the radio as I was on my way here. Duty Night says he’s had a message pushed through to him from a Mr Wilde of Hobart Place; says you probably know of him. Would you be sure to see him at his house tomorrow. At five o’clock.’

Tuesday, 21 December

It was a pretty sight. And a pretty sound.

Despite their certain place on the calendar, Christmas carols, like Guy Fawkes and fireworks, always catch by surprise. Even after weeks of preparation, with every piggy bank emptied and every ribbon tied, the first ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in a cold December street is always unexpected.

So when Tom turned the corner and saw them there, stamping their feet in the snow, fur hats, scarves and mufflers bobbing with the rhythm, lanterns held high above their music sheets, he was surprised.

Even the house in Hobart Place at the corner of Grosvenor Gardens seemed perfectly and suddenly Dickensian. A small red-brick house with a broad shiny black door, tucked back from the pavement, almost completely hidden by the brand new concrete wall of a brand new office block.

Tom folded a one-pound note and slipped it into the slot of the carol singers’ collection box. A poster hanging from it showed a Bengali child with bulging eyes and bulging ribcage. He felt offended. Christ! he thought. Save the Children by all means but spare us the pictures at Christmas. He wondered how much of his pound would find its way to the slums of Dacca.

There was no bell so Tom hammered the black door with a large brass lion’s head. The carol singers began ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. He waited. There was no answer. He hit the door again so hard with the lion that it shook in its frame. A key turned and yellow light shone out across the pavement.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the man. ‘I thought you were one of them.’ He stood to one side as Tom edged past him into the narrow passage.

‘I never know,’ the man went on, ‘whether I am mean or merely embarrassed. But I would do almost anything to avoid answering the door to them.’

Tom walked into a study at the end of the passage as it seemed to lead nowhere else.

‘Maybe,’ Tom said, over his shoulder, ‘you should arrange a standing order and save yourself the trouble!’ He heard the front door slam and the lock turn.

‘I didn’t expect a sense of humour, Mr McCullin,’ the man said as he entered the study. He carefully closed the door from the passage and locked that as well. ‘I have none myself. I am an introvert, a very private man. I am one of those extraordinary beings, Mr McCullin, who has a thorough dislike of his fellow man. I tend to dislike everyone. Especially people who sing in the streets.’

‘They were singing to feed a hungry Bengali,’ Tom said. Then that’s some comfort to me. I wouldn’t want to feel mean without cause.’ He smiled. The tight grey skin around his mouth that might once have been lips looked as if it would break.

Tom said, ‘Why have you asked me here, and why have you locked both doors?’

Think nothing of the doors, Mr McCullin. It’s a little fetish of mine, something I’ve done since I was a child. I feel protected by a lock. No one can just “walk in”, just “arrive”, if you understand.’

‘What do you want?’ asked Tom. The man sat down but Tom ignored his gesture and continued standing.

‘Mr McCullin, I know you are an agent of sorts. I know you were employed on a casual basis by what is cryptically referred to as SSO. I know also that you have been making “inquiries” of certain members of my Trust. Activities which of course concern the Trust in no way at all.’

Tom stood and looked but said nothing. The carol singers outside launched into the final chorus of ‘Royal David’. The descant all but drowned the theme.

The man began again. ‘It is important for me to know whether. . . Damn their bloody eyes!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Will they never stop their blasted noise?’

He jumped from his chair, ran to the window and slammed the shutters tight, ramming the iron bar into place so viciously that paint from the frames flaked off and fell on to the cushions of the window-seat.

His eyes bulged in his small white face and the blue veins in his temples stood out as if they were varicosed. The broad smooth dome of his large forehead glistened with sweat. He began breathing deep and regular, filling his lungs with oxygen to help dissolve the hate and fury in his blood.

For that instant he had lost control, forced into violent anger by the sound of a carol.

He sat down again. Slowly, carefully, he opened the fingers of both hands wide and then flung them together with a slap, interlacing them and bending the fingertips over the knuckles so hard that both hands went white with the pressure. He looked into the fireplace where a small fire was burning. He had quite forgotten Tom.

An unlikely man to be Governing Secretary of what publicly had always seemed such a gentle Society, the British Heritage Trust.

But then, what was not generally known about him was that he had many moods like this. Psychopathic urges that were only just kept under control by an understanding doctor and the drugs he prescribed. Doctor and drugs between them had managed to control the more destructive of the many masochistic practices he frequently indulged in. The scars that covered his body were now only infrequently joined by new ones. He was indeed a private man, whose acts of violent self-abuse and the devices he used to perform them astonished even his psychiatrist, who had seen much in his profession.

He continued staring into the fire. His chest had stopped heaving and the skin on his temples was smooth again. He began picking at a scab on the back of his left hand, digging into the hardened dull red sore with his thumb-nail. Blood began to trickle from the broken crust. Most certainly an unlikely man to be concerned for so long with British flora and fauna, stately homes and their diminishing legacies!

Frederick Broughton Wilde was forty-seven years old. His Christian name was given him by his Austrian mother, his surname by a man who crossed Matabeleland, Mashonaland and Manicaland at the turn of the century to help make Rhodesia safe for Cecil Rhodes and his doubtful company of commercial adventurers. What was not generally known about him was the enormous amount of his own inherited wealth he had, over the past eight or more years, contributed to various funds - funds which all shared a common trinity of hatreds: Race, Religion, Colour. Although he had been careful not to join them, his support of them had been constant.

In the past five years, for example, he had given nearly a quarter of a million pounds to the National Front. He had financed, to a greater extent, their successes in the past two General Elections, increasing their seats in the Commons from nil to fifteen.

He was a member of CORDON; acknowledged by the Chairman and Board Directors to be a vital part of it and essential to the process of the coup itself.

Naturally he, like so many of the top men involved, knew the coup was imminent and knew its objectives. But again, like the others, he did not know when or how it would be achieved.

He had infinite faith in the Chairman, and in all the years he had been actively and closely involved in CORDON he had never once doubted its inevitable success.

So he had not been unduly surprised to receive instructions by telephone the previous afternoon to contact a Tom McCullin of SSO, invite him to the house in Hobart Place, where very few others had ever entered, and put to him the suggestions relayed from CORDON Headquarters by what to Wilde was evidently a dictaphone machine. But he must not - the negative was emphasised twice by the machine - he must not use the Alert number to confirm Tom’s acceptance. CORDON would know if the plan was under way.

And in keeping with the discipline he exercised in all such matters concerning CORDON it never occurred to him to ask why. Obedience in all things at all times was a CORDON rule he had long learnt to respect.

‘Please excuse me, Mr McCullin,’ he said, looking up from the fire. ‘I have been under a great deal of strain recently, and for a private man like myself the intrusion of noise is the least bearable thing.’

‘But,’ Tom said, ‘you live at the comer of one of the noisiest streets in London. And you live in the front room, which must be the noisiest in the whole house. If it’s so painful, why not move?’

The grey watery eyes looked back at him. There was something in the expression that Tom thought he recognised but couldn’t describe.

Wilde said nothing. But his large eyes nestling in heavy pouches of creased grey skin showed the man’s satisfaction that his endurance of pain should be recognised so completely by a stranger.

‘Your investigations,’ he said, not answering Tom’s question, and speaking in a quiet calm voice as if the past minute had never taken place, ‘your investigations could be extremely damaging to the Trust if they ever became public. My information is that you are attempting to connect certain political activities with it. Almost, as it were, as if the Trust was some kind of front for political extremists.’

He cocked his head at Tom, like a chicken. But Tom said nothing. He watched the water in the man’s eyes welling into the outer comers and begin streaming into his crow’s-feet.

‘I must be frank with you, Mr McCullin. Your activities are causing us much concern. Can you imagine the embarrassment if any part of your investigation was picked up by the national Press? The Trust would never recover. Contributions and legacies would stop and a very fine and honoured national institution would suddenly cease to exist, and with it some of this country’s finest treasures. Posterity would damn you for it.’

‘Mr Wilde,’ Tom said, ‘I am making inquiries about some of your members, all, as it happens, committee members. We think your Trust is a protective disguise, a front for something very political and very extreme. We consider you all very dangerous men who are preparing to attempt a very dangerous experiment. Something the Government and people of this country are not prepared to accept.’