The Partridge Kite (33 page)

He stumbled forward, dropped something and began turning in a circle looking for it, holding out his hands in front of him as if trying to push the flames away.

He turned again and in the light Tom suddenly saw his face. A face he knew, the face that fitted the familiar voice. He saw the Chairman of CORDON.

Tom moved quickly forward to help him but as he did, instead of coming away from the fire, the man stopped. Then cupping his face in his hands, head bowed, he turned and walked slowly into the flames.

The heat was intense now with the closer fall of burning rubble, but Tom moved forward, his face stinging, and stood just beyond reach of the flames. He went down on one knee. By his feet was a small blue fabric book, a logbook with the Royal Air Force Eagle on the front. In the light of the blaze he read the service number and the famous name, and the initials V.C. underneath.

He picked it up and ran his fingers across the cover and hesitated. Then, not knowing why, he threw it as hard as he could into the fire.

He walked backwards away from the heat, scooped up snow and covered his face with it. His eyes were closed but he could still see the house as a ball of orange flame. And the image of the man walking slowly to his death.

He brushed the snow away. And he understood. The man had killed himself to save his anonymity. He had lost the future but he had been determined at all costs to preserve his glorious past. He had wanted to die with his secret.

And Tom, for reasons he would never be able to explain to himself, decided at that moment it would always remain so.

He looked up. To the east, high above the forest behind him, he saw searchlights in the sky. As they came closer he saw the bright yellow noses of three RAF Whirlwind helicopters.

RESCUE was painted boldly in red on their sides.

In those final hours of Christmas Eve, there were confused police reports from the London suburbs of Notting Hill, Lewisham, Brixton, Southall. And from Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham and Bradford.

There had been accidents involving twenty-two milk tankers all belonging apparently to the same West Country dairy. In the cab of each they had found a dead driver and all as it happened had died the same way. Their upper torsos from hip to head had been blown away.

It was also observed that the areas in which the tankers had been found shared a common feature. They were all immigrant ghettoes.

The earlier reports noted that the tankers had been carrying what had at first been thought to be mercury. But very soon all reports tallied. Senior chemists had identified the substance as Beryllium Sulphate, which puzzled them. It was, they said, very poisonous but in this fluid state very manageable and really quite useless.

At midnight belfries shook with the ring of bells and people beneath the church towers plodded through the falling snow to sing the first carols of Christmas.

And the police guards throughout London and the Midlands who had been surrounding the tankers were relieved by teams of men who identified themselves as Military Intelligence. One by one in twenty-two different locations the twenty-two tankers were carefully hoisted on to army tank trailers and taken away.

And the most senior police officer in each of those areas received a telephone call from his most senior authority at the Home Office in Whitehall. Their instructions were quite explicit.

There never had been milk tankers. Nor corpses. Nor a chemists’ report on Beryllium Sulphate.

New Year’s Eve

The six were not arrested. They were visited of course, each in turn, by many people from many Government and Military Departments and long conversations took place. One by one they were asked to supply more detail of the Organisation they had supported and financed for so long. One by one they obliged; some taking a fraction more persuasion than the others.

So within a remarkably short time the Government and its Intelligence Agencies, including what was left of the rehoused Special State Operations, came to know just how close the British had come to war with themselves.

Privately, sensible people did not see it as a victory. Inside that very tight small grouping of people who actually govern this country, the shortlist of the elite, there was a shared feeling of incompleteness. A feeling that only the really big fish had been netted and across the nation there were still thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people still waiting for the signal. Most certainly there was left at the end of it all the suspicion that although the brain had been destroyed the eager body had not.

Within the next few months, many men and women in middle and high places in Government, the Services, Police, Commerce and Industry, would suddenly decide to retire early and forgo their pensions. Others would not be given the option but be told to gather together what they could and leave for South America.

The six themselves, once their co-operation had been utilised, were given an ultimatum. Not the threat of trial or imprisonment, nothing as public as that. And without exception they accepted.

It would be quite some time before the British people were informed by the British Press of the departure of such eminent people. For their emigration was discreet and well-spaced, and their own separate explanations of ‘exorbitant taxation’, ‘the debilitation of our moral attitudes’, ‘the curse of incumbent Socialism’, or simply ‘retirement in the sun’ seemed to satisfy what was only a slightly curious public anyway.

The explanation given by Anthony Mostyn and his two brothers, that they were leaving ‘a land of lost opportunities’, gave Tom and Fry, who was now convalescing with his mother in Farnham, the only touch of humour in the whole affair.

Kate, as irony would have it, was transferred to Sweden. Not to the fictitious Trygg-Ö-Säker in Malmö or through any vindictiveness on the part of Military Intelligence. It was simply a post recently vacated that needed to be filled and she, according to Personnel, was the next in line for promotion and the extra $280 a year that went with it.

She did not say goodbye; it seemed absurd to do so. They had said it so many times before and always so finally.

Tom received notification from his bank that a credit of ten thousand pounds had been paid into his current account the previous morning.

He sat on his bed in Marks and Spencer briefs and reached out again for the bottle of whisky. It was after all five-thirty p.m. and there was one good reason why he should be drinking the Old Year out.

He pulled the fan heater closer to the bed and began flipping through brochures advertising package holidays on Greek Islands. But somehow the cheaply printed, out-of-register photographs didn’t seem as attractive as they might

He poured more whisky into the tumbler, a large one, and swallowed it in one gulp, then leant forward and tugged at the lead of the portable television that was nestling among the blankets on his bed.

The early evening ITN news reported the Prime Minister’s visit to the Seychelles, recuperating from his attack of coronary thrombosis. An anonymous head in the studio rambled incoherently on about the possibility of an early election.

Violence continued in the West Indies, and the British Leyland sit-in was in its fifth week. The pound sterling was rallying to a cent above parity with the US dollar, the new President of Zimbabwe, the fifth in as many military coups, had ordered all remaining whites out of the country, and King Idi Amin Dada of the recently announced Kingdom of Uganda had offered a squadron of Royal Migs to encourage them on their way.

But Tom heard nothing more. He had fallen into a drunken sleep. His chin hit his chest and he began to breathe noisily through his mouth.

An advertisement for a well-known detergent powder proudly boasted its new improved formula, the thirtieth such improvement in its marketing history. The tumbler resting on Tom’s chest tipped over, whisky drenched the pictures of Greek villas, and dripped on to the lino on the floor.

It was New Year’s Eve and Tom had done exactly what he’d promised himself he would do.

If he couldn’t spend it in company he’d make certain he wouldn’t know he’d spent it alone.

About the author

Michael Nicholson is one of the world’s most travelled and most decorated television foreign correspondents. He has braved 18 war zones over the past 40 years, picking up a host of awards. Michael is a familiar face in Britain’s homes as a former anchor of ITV’s Evening News and a correspondent for long-running current affairs series Tonight.

He has won numerous British and international awards for his reports – from Biafra, Cyprus and Vietnam – and has twice been named the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year. For his coverage of the Falklands War he was given the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Award by BAFTA. In 1991, Michael was awarded the OBE for his reporting of the Gulf War.

His books include The Partridge Kite, Red Joker, December Ultimatum, Pilgrims Rest, Across the Limpopo and his memoir A Measure of Danger. His book Natasha’s Story, the gripping account of how he bought an orphan from war-torn Bosnia home to the UK, was made into the Hollywood film Welcome to Sarajevo in 1997.

PUBLISHING INFORMATION

PUBLISHED BY APOSTROPHE BOOKS LTD

www.apostrophebooks.com

ISBN: 9781910167656

First published Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1978.

Digital edition produced in 2014 by Apostrophe Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Nicholson 1978.

Michael Nicholson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Apostrophe Books Ltd Reg. No. 7612239

Cover image: public domain illustration.

Cover design by Jamie Downham.