Half a Crown (6 page)

“Looks like the Chief has got us all on the hop today,” Fanshaw said, and left.

“So what’s the short version?” Carmichael asked, drinking his own neglected tea. “Make it quick, I have to go in a minute.”

“Clash between two groups of Ironsides, like I said. It doesn’t make much sense, if you ask me. Lot of nonsense, probably. Of your nine deaths, six of them were only Jews, and so were ten of the casualties. Some lad from Liverpool, here for the march, stood up and started saying that Normanby wasn’t tough enough on the Jews. People who didn’t like that started breaking heads, and his boys hit back. Or, to listen to the other side, he said some words against the Prime Minister and then when they replied verbally, fists came out. There was nothing worse than fists and improvised weapons. Lots of the injuries were fire-related. The deaths that weren’t Jews were from trampling.”

“Charming,” said Carmichael. “I take it we have the agitator from Liverpool in custody?”

“Regrettably not,” Ogilvie said. “We do know his name. Shall I send someone around to pick him up?”

“Might be for the best. And don’t let anyone go until I have a policy decision on all of this. The Prime Minister is taking an interest and making a statement in the House. We don’t want to get caught with our trousers down.” He reached for the envelope. “What’s in here?”

“A summary of the interviews, a few photographs, and a report,” Ogilvie said. “That enough?”

“It’ll have to be. Walk up with me.”

In deliberate contrast to the way New New Scotland Yard was arranged, Carmichael’s office was in the bowels of the Watch building, underground in a bombproof cellar supposedly proof against anything but a direct hit—though with the new Atomic Bomb in consideration, he doubted it was any safer than anywhere else. Carmichael took his hat and coat from the hat stand in the hall, nodded good-bye to Miss Duthie, who was perched at her desk, and walked down the hall, Ogilvie at his side.

There was a lift to the upper levels. Carmichael preferred to walk up the green-painted stairs. The introduction of concrete and steel as a major building material in the last twenty years had led to many interesting new styles, of which the Neo-Assyrian of the New New Scotland Yard, with its flattened sphinxes, was by far the ugliest. In contrast, the Watch building was a pillared reminder of Palladian elegance, with the front sporting pillars four stories high. Wags had immediately dubbed it the Watchtower, naturally, and the name had gone through the usual stages of changing from joke to almost official status. The stairway brought Carmichael and Ogilvie out at ground level, between the bases of two pillars. It was raining heavily. A guard standing under the portico nodded to them.

“I’ll have that agitator in custody before you get back, sir,” Ogilvie promised.

“It’s a stupid waste of our time,” Carmichael said. “Charge him with being a communist; that should wreck his credibility with his friends.”

Ogilvie laughed and retreated back inside. Carmichael hurried down the steps, nodding to one of the waiting unmarked black cars. “Just down to the Palace of Westminster,” he told the driver as he got in.

In the back of the car he looked through Ogilvie’s envelope, finding it well arranged, as he had expected.

At the Victorian Gothic monstrosity of the Houses of Parliament he told the car to wait. He hurried past the statue of Cromwell, turning up his collar against the spring rain, and hastened inside.

Mark Normanby was alone in his office when Carmichael was shown in. He sat behind his desk in his great humming wheelchair. A plaid blanket covered the Prime Minister’s useless legs, paralyzed since an assassination attempt in 1949. Carmichael had saved his life but not his legs, and Normanby had never forgiven him.

It was such a commonplace of political cartoons to portray Normanby as a spider that Carmichael was surprised every time he saw him how apt it seemed. Normanby had never been a very big man, and now he was shrunken in the huge powered chair. He had been good-looking; now he was like some ruined Byron. “So here you are at last,” he greeted Carmichael, though he was exactly on time for his appointment. “Have you finally got me some information?”

Carmichael knew better than to answer his barbs. Normanby could still be smooth and pleasant when he needed to be, but it seemed he needed to be less and less often, and he had always delighted in tormenting Carmichael. There were no chairs in the room. Carmichael could not feel comfortable standing, and he knew Normanby relished the psychological advantage it gave him. He
stood at the modified parade ground attention he had mastered in the army so long ago. “The riot seems to have been an odd affair of different groups of Ironsides clashing,” he said. “I have a report here for you. It seems some of them were shouting for a stronger policy on the Jews, and others supported you.”

“Let me see,” Normanby said. Carmichael walked over to him and gave him the envelope. He stood near while Normanby flicked through the photographs and read the summary. The Prime Minister looked bored, until something made him whiten, his hands tensing on the papers so that they shook in his hand. “Cripple?” he asked. “Cripple, is it? Weak and a cripple?” He set the envelope down and looked up at Carmichael. “Let those who were fighting for me go, and send the rest off with the next lot of deportees. That’ll teach them who’s weak.”

“Is that wise?” Carmichael dared to ask. “They’re not Jews, and not communists, and they will have connections.”

“Oh yes, connections,” Normanby sneered. “They’re Mosleyites, calling for British power and using the old name Blackshirts. Send them off; they’re no good to us and no good to the country. I’ll get you to deal with whatever connections they have too, nip it in the bud. Report directly to me if there are any inquiries about them—especially ones from high places.”

“Whatever you say, sir,” Carmichael said. He made a note. “About the other things you asked about—”

“I don’t have time now. Leave me the briefs,” Normanby said.

“Here you are.” Carmichael handed over the folders. “There was one thing my chap said which isn’t in the report in so many words, which is that our people feel that the Foreign Office have been meddling with this Scythia thing and that this could cause problems with Japan.”

“Guy’s been meddling?” Normanby’s eyes were sharp. “I’ll look into that. That’s useful. Good that they’re all going to be here for
this wretched conference, it’ll give me a chance to sort things out for myself.”

Carmichael moved towards the door. “Have you still got that good-looking valet?” Normanby asked.

“You know I have, sir,” Carmichael replied calmly, though his heart had jumped, and he suspected Normanby knew as much.

Normanby laughed. “Just checking,” he said. “Go and get on with it, Carmichael. And I’m going to say the rioters were communist saboteurs, so you can write them down that way when you send them off to the camps.”

“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, and left. He stood in the corridor for a moment waiting for his heart to stop racing, and only too glad to be out of the room. Normanby needed him, he thought. It was why he was alive, how he could get away with what he did get away with—Jack, the Inner Watch, all of it. He won what he could by being useful to Normanby. If it suited Normanby to torment him, it was a small price, really. He was sure Normanby knew how much he hated him, knew it and relished it. He shook his head and walked back to his car.

“Farthing! Normanby!”

I wasn’t down for long, a few moments only, but it felt like a century. I was terrified that I’d be trampled. I put one arm over my head and tried to struggle back to my feet. It was like those dreams of walking through treacle. The crowd pushed against me, and someone did tread on my leg. Then somebody helped me up, a complete stranger, a burly middle-aged man in a cloth cap. “Thank you!” I said, and heard myself saying it in my old voice, my Cockney voice.

“You’re welcome, love. This is no place for a lass,” he said, and turned back to pummeling his neighbor.

I took a step away from him and tried to run, realizing immediately that it was impossible because when I’d fallen, I’d lost a shoe. Absurdly, I thought of Sir Alan calling me Cinderella. The pressure of the crowd was holding me up, but if I tried to run I’d fall. The sensible thing would have been to take the other one off, but I didn’t want to bend down, either. Being under the level of the surface of the crowd had scared me too much to risk it again. I looked around for Sir Alan and Betsy but couldn’t see them anywhere. I did see the young guitar player, who was abruptly next to me as the crowd swayed. He gave me a lovely smile as he passed, singing out, “Power, power, British power!”

Then I thought I was saved. On the edge of the crowd I could see a policeman—not a Watchman, but an ordinary London bobby. I staggered as best I could in his direction, ducking blows.

He was the edge of a big police operation. There were police cars and big black vans. I was comforted by the sight of them. I thought they’d help me. It’s hard to believe I was that naïve. I’d known as a child not to trust the rozzers, even though my father was Scotland Yard, and as proud of it as a dog with two tails. In the last ten years I’d got used to seeing the police as a kind of servants.

“Police!” someone more sensible shouted, and the crowd started to move away from them. It was hard for the crowd to go anywhere, because they were so tightly packed and because there was more crowd beyond, people who had been listening to the bands and the other speakers, who had also begun to fight now. The police were grabbing everyone they could, quite indiscriminately. I still thought they’d help me, right up to the point where they grabbed me and threw me into the Black Maria.

I landed on my stomach with all the wind knocked out of me. By the time I struggled onto my knees, the van was almost full and had started to move. It was very dark, lit only by whatever light came in from streetlights through the cracks around the door. “What’s happening?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

“Little trip to the cells,” someone said, a man with a Northern accent, perhaps the one who had helped me up before. “Don’t worry, they’ll check us over and let us go. Like old times, this is.”

Someone put an arm around me, which I welcomed for the comfort until he started groping my breast, whereupon I poked him in the ribs, hard. This had always worked with men at parties and in Switzerland, and it worked now, though perhaps only because the van stopped abruptly at that point, knocking me off balance again and jerking my would-be assailant forwards.

The van doors opened. Three policemen stood there, one with a
torch and two with leashed dogs, big beautiful German shepherds with smooth well-cared-for fur.

“You’re in Paddington Nick,” one of the policemen said. “Come out quietly one at a time and let’s have no trouble, or Betsy here will have to have a word with you.” His dog growled. How strange it was that she should be called Betsy. I wondered where my Betsy was, if she had got away or if she and Sir Alan were in another such police station. I hoped they had made it back to the car.

I came out when the torch shone on me. I limped quietly into the station on my one shoe. When I stooped to try to take it off, the bobby hurried me on. The station seemed very bright inside. It smelled strongly of disinfectant. “Papers,” the man inside the door demanded.

I took my card from my bag, very grateful that it had remained on my arm through all of that. He glanced at it, and then back at me, checking the photograph. He hesitated for a moment, looking back at the photograph, where my hair was neat, not draggled around my face, and I wore no makeup. My features must have reassured him, because he nodded. “Bag,” he said. I held out my bag, and he rummaged through it, pausing twice, at what I guessed were Betsy’s pearls and my purse. Nothing else seemed to disturb him. He stuck a numbered label on it, and another on my papers, and put them both on wire racks, with stacks of other cards and assorted possessions.

“Stand up,” he said.

I stood, and he patted me down in a bored and professional way, finding nothing.

“Go through, you’ll be called when it’s time to be booked,” he said, clearly his routine speech.

“Can I have my things back, please?” I asked, as politely as I could, and quite deliberately in my best Arlinghurst accent.

“You’ll have them back when you’re released, miss,” he said. “Purse too. We don’t allow papers or money in the cells.”

I went in. I’d surprised a “miss” out of him, but if my modulated voice wasn’t good for more than that, I could see that it would be better to use my childhood voice in the station, as I instinctively had with the crowd. I’d had more than enough of being picked on for my accent.

I went through, as the policeman had indicated, into a room with three walls with benches along them, and bars separating it from a corridor. This room, I was relieved to see, contained women only—about a dozen of them. Most of them were respectably dressed, but one or two wore men’s raincoats over underclothes, the uniform of the London streetwalker. “Was you in the riot up Marble Arch?” one of these asked me.

“Yes,” I said, back in the voice of my childhood. It was strange how unnatural it seemed to use it deliberately. “I got separated from my boyfriend and dragged off by the rozzers. I hadn’t done nothing, they can’t book me, can they?”

“Don’t worry,” said a middle-aged woman in a headscarf and a wool coat. “They always used to do this when there was fighting, in the old days, when the communists would come out and provoke us. They scoop everyone up, then they sort through and let the Ironsides go. They didn’t used to charge us or nothing. We’ll only be here an hour or so, I should think, love. Come and sit down.”

I walked over to where she was sitting and sat on the hard bench beside her, my back against the wall. I took off my useless shoe. My stockings were ruined, the feet shredded and huge ladders running up my legs. I pulled them off and balled them up and stuck them in my coat pocket.

“But there weren’t any communists,” said a thin-faced woman pacing by the bars. “How will they sort us out?”