The Partridge Kite (7 page)

The story concluded, ‘There is no doubt that Mr Scammill’s death has prompted the Union’s turnabout. He was the driving force behind the strike and it was his casting vote as General Secretary that decided what would have been the first-ever international strike.’

That was it. Motive as big as a house. So the people he was after, the organisation Mr Hampton’s wealthy clients were worried about, were bloody Right-Wingers - and way to the right, too, if Swedish merchant bankers wanted them stopped. If Mr Hampton’s clients
were
Swedish: or even merchant bankers!

Tom showered and shaved. With a towel around his middle he poured more warm water into the mug, washed away the smell of coffee, and made tea. The Department’s charwoman, noticing over a period of some months that Tom’s kettle was never out of the cupboard, concluded that her Mr McCullin never drank at home, not hot things anyway. Cold drinks like Scotch she knew her Mr McCullin certainly did drink. In fact she would go so far as to say, filling his dustbin with empty bottles gathered from all comers of his flat, that Mr McCullin was very fond of drinking cold drinks at home. This morning McCullin was not overfond of himself. He sat on a three-legged high stool and tilted it back until he was resting against the wall. He put his bare feet up on the Formica working top that served as a table next to the small gas cooker, and flipped the tea-bag out of his mug with a spoon into the kitchen sink on the opposite wall in one well-practised movement.

He thought back to Angola years ago during the Independence Celebrations. There had been hundreds of soldiers roaming the streets, drunk on Portuguese beer or high on hash, firing their rifles into the air or at anyone they didn’t fancy. Tom had found himself surrounded by about a dozen of them and they’d begun prodding him with their gun barrels. One of them started to fire at the street lamps outside the rundown deserted hotel that Tom was staying at. . . one - two - three bursts of automatic fire. Tom, sensing the danger, offered one wild shooter a cigar and borrowed his rifle, a German Mauser. Without sighting Tom lifted the weapon and with a single shell hit a small gas-filled lamp one hundred and twenty yards away.

The soldiers were impressed but it was not enough. Behind him Tom saw that one of them had fallen down dead drunk and was sprawled across the pavement face upwards, mouth and eyes wide open.

A beetle, the size of a thumbnail, was crawling up his face. Tom spat and covered the beetle and one open eye with phlegm - a three-yard aim. The soldiers were delighted and carried Tom shoulder high across to his hotel and safety.

He’d never told the story to anyone, and he wondered why he should remind himself of it now. He wondered why he had begun the habit lately of going back over the years and dwelling on the highlights.

He looked through the open door which divided the cramped kitchen from the even smaller bathroom and could see himself in the mirror that covered the far wall. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like the white legs with the blue veins running across the calves like cheese. He didn’t like the fat that lapped over the towel around his waist.

Once, he could remember knowing that he was good- looking. He could remember how often he’d stand in front of a similar bathroom mirror admiring himself, running his hands over his stomach muscles, grabbing the cheeks of his ass, hard bunches of muscle. He would feel like bursting with his fitness - not an ounce of fat or flesh to spare!

He remembered the first time he’d taken Kate out, seven years ago this coming Christmas Eve. He’d felt superb, his body tingling with the gallons of after-shave he’d splashed everywhere, his skin tanned after three months in Southern Africa. He’d felt gloriously strong.

But the man in the bathroom mirror, sipping his lukewarm tea, felt a grandfather to that memory. His eyes glazed until the reflection in the mirror was out of focus. He threw the remainder of the tea into the sink and jumped up, the stool crashing to the floor. He slammed the bathroom door shut, walked back into his bedroom and began looking for his shirt and trousers.

He looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes to twelve. He began dialling the Malmö code: 010 46 40, and the six numbers Hampton had given him. At the second attempt all twelve numbers hit the target. At the third double signal there was a click and Hampton’s voice began.

‘Good morning, Tom!’

Tom began to answer, forgetting for an instant that he was listening to a machine.

‘Go ahead, Tom, with whatever queries you have after your reading last night. Speak now.’

Tom hesitated, trying to hustle his thoughts together.

‘Hampton,’ he said, ‘there are things you know about this setup you haven’t told me about. That’s fact. Now, why shouldn’t you tell me things if you are paying me to help you? Doesn’t make sense, does it? Why didn’t you tell me, for example, that you knew the organisation that did the bank and the rig also clobbered Scammill? You do know, and you’re bloody well going to tell me and save all the running about the houses. You’ll also tell me, Hampton, why you or your bosses thought it necessary not to be straight with me from the start. I think the people you’re after are a neo-Fascist bunch - and what’s more, you know they are! Now the money’s in the bank just as you promised, and it’s a bloody great temptation to let it stay there. But if you’re going to piss me about you can have it straight back. And where were you last night? I rang you back about an hour after I’d left you and you’d checked out. And how the hell did you get back to Malmö? You missed last night’s flight, and you couldn’t have made it back by midday today. I’ll ring the same time tomorrow, Hampton, so you’ve plenty of time to sort yourself out. I mean what I say, Hampton! Sort yourself out or I’m out of it!’

He put the phone down. A bit of bravado might serve a useful purpose. He wasn’t a fool. He knew it; Hampton ought to know it too.

He went back into the bedroom and began tidying up the papers on the floor. It took him half an hour, shuffling them together into the order Hampton might have recognised. He switched on the twelve o’clock news summary; bullion, bombing and Scammill still led the bulletins . . . endless authoritative post-mortems, denial by the IRA of any responsibility, a statement in the House this afternoon by the Prime Minister and a backup speech by the Home Secretary. More about the negotiations leading hopefully to peace on the railways . . . still fighting in Southern Africa. . . another Midlands car component factory closes down but the workforce sits in.

Christ, he thought, I’d rather be an undertaker than a newsreader. He left his flat and walked to the Italian House in Tottenham Court Road for a pizza and a cup of Espresso.

Two men fell into step behind, neither realising yet that they were both following the same man. It was a cold bright sunny day, the first in a fortnight, and the early morning wind had all but dried the pavements. The man furthest from Tom still carried his umbrella.

The Department was now housed in Victoria Street, SW1 - a wide, grossly expensive alley of glass and concrete, stretching from Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station at the northern end. Victoria Street was once a friendly hotchpotch of a London street but highly-paid architects had turned it into a glasshouse, its windows reflecting only the sky - curtainless and lifeless.

The Department had moved to Victoria from the elegance of Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park. There they had quiet, a view and a pub across the gate in Park Road that served braised lamb hearts and stuffing most lunchtimes.

It was twelve-thirty. Kellick and Fry were viewing their lunch at the ‘good food’ pub in Old Pye Street, dark brown armoured sausages, tinned baked beans and a half pint. Across the other side of St James’s Park, Tom was beginning his pizza and coffee. Fry’s meeting with Kellick that morning had been brief and unfriendly. Kellick admitted that he’d had Tom tailed in response to Fry’s uneasiness last night

‘For insurance reasons,’ he said, ‘to cover ourselves. Good sense, no panic. Remember,’ he told Fry, ‘not to overlook the small things. They have a habit of getting bigger. Remember the pennies and the pounds!’

Fry had a headache and a sore throat and said nothing. He remembered only last night. He eased the top of his polo-neck white sweater closer to his ears to protect his throat from the draughts. He felt sour.

Last night he’d been drunk and worried - worried enough to go to Kate Cathcart at her Chelsea home straight from the hotel and tell her what he’d seen from the window. She’d offered him Dutch Geneva mixed with hot water and lemon and he’d relaxed. It helped him speak easily to her, and she helped him along. He’d told her he was out of his depth - he was not a field man. This was the first time he’d left the inertia and waxed floors of the Department.

Kellick, he had told her, sounded grand at his pre-contract briefings and callbacks but he knew and Kate knew - everyone knew - that Kellick never left the Department, let alone England, unless it was on holiday to his grotty breeze-block bungalow in Alicante. What the hell, he’d said, does Kellick know about people like McCullin? Or me?

All this to Mrs Cathcart last night. She was sympathetic and generous with the hot water and gin. He hadn’t really had to make such a pig of himself alone in the hotel. She’d listened and she’d poured.

This morning as he hurried through her section he hadn’t even had the nerve to look at her. How much did he say last night? He questioned himself. He could remember her living-room, the copper kettle on the goat rug, the signed Russell Flint over the fireplace. He could remember she wasn’t wearing stockings or tights. And for the first time he was surprised how long her thighs were - attractive and brown. But what else had he said? He was depressed.

Both men had listened to Tom’s taped message at midday. It had been rerouted to the Department through the automatic exchange by the combination of the six numbers Fry had given him to dial. Those six numbers had reversed the Malmö code, and Tom had given his ultimatum to a recording machine on a direct line to an annexe of Kellick’s Department in London, SW1.

Kellick and Fry had been both pleased and displeased at Tom’s tone. Displeased that he had jumped ahead of their schedule, come to his correct conclusions quicker than they’d anticipated. Pleased because he had obviously taken the bait, had worked through much of the night, was anxious to get on with it.

The excuses could wait. The most pressing thing now was where to guide Tom next.

Both men read and re-read the mass of information around them. But the more they read the more convinced they were that the starter clue was to be found elsewhere.

‘Sanderson . . . It’s got to be Sanderson!’ Kellick got up and walked to the window and looked down at the tops of die red buses in Victoria Street.

‘We could spend weeks, months, looking for the tiniest mistake these people made last Friday and still get nowhere. The computers have already saturated us in data. Do you know, Fry, how many qualified helicopter pilots there are in this country? - assuming that the one who took that bomb to the Temax rig was British anyway.

‘And where do we begin to look for 126 gold bars? What part of London, what part of Britain, or Europe? We know we’ll get no help from informers. Except Sanderson himself.’

For the next three and a half hours Kellick and Fry went over Sanderson’s interview word by word; sometimes playing back the tape, sometimes reading only the transcript. Sometimes, if passages were ambiguous, they would read them out aloud. Fry reading out Sanderson’s replies to Kellick’s repeated questions - both men acting the parts of inquisitor and inquisitioned.

Somewhere in the forty-seven minutes of tape, somewhere in the nine thousand words of transcript, was the tip-off, deliberate or accidental, that would point the way. They were acting out the interview for the second time when Fry stopped.

‘Fascio di Combattimento!’

‘What of it?’ Kellick was standing by the window again.

‘Sanderson mentioned it. What does it mean?’

Kellick thought back thirty years. Second class Honours, Politics, Philosophy, Economics. R. Palme Dutt’s
Fascism and the Social Revolution,
three questions on the same Finals paper.

‘It was the beginning of Italian Fascism proper; the new start for Mussolini after the First World War. Early 1919, a confused, chauvinistic, republican, revolutionary-sounding programme - understood by very few at the time including that idiot Mussolini himself. Why do you ask, Fry?’

There was a mention of it in
The Times
. . . a letter; the computers dug it up.’

He picked up a folder and pulled out three sheets of computer typing, two hundred and seventy-eight references to Fascism made in public during the past thirty months. He flipped through the papers, running his finger down the columns.

‘Here it is. . .
Times,
Monday, 5 January.’

Kellick moved from the window and stood behind Fry who was sitting at the desk with the computer sheets now laid across it.

‘Let me read it to you. The first few paragraphs . . . the need to find industrial and social peace . . . permanent solution . . . all of one nation and so on . . . Here’s the bit we want!’

He quoted: ‘We all appreciate that the future of this country can only be safeguarded by a strong popular government - whether it be this present one, the Opposition or a coalition of the best from all three parties. But we must have strong government soon, for there are men in this country who are at this very moment rejoicing in the disasters we are bringing on ourselves. Men whose strength grows from mass unemployment, strikes, our crippling borrowing and the exacerbation of race relations. Men who thrive on the growing frustration we all sense around us.

‘These men are not the Marxists, Trotskyists, Maoists or International Socialists the media is full of. The menace is from the Right, the Far Right. There are men who are banding together even now to bring Fascism back to this country. Their shibboleth is Mussolini’s ‘Fascio di Combattimento’; meaningless mumbo-jumbo but powerful meat to the discontented!