Hostage (10 page)

‘If he was our nuclear physicist I can guess. Because he knew too much and was no further use. If he wasn’t the man, a desperate Government could have thought he was. But I don’t expect to be told. My group was not engaged.’

‘Did you ever tell your little Elise that when I escaped from the newspaper reporters I was dressed as a young man?’

‘I remember repeating to her what Rex told me: that you did.’

‘With a beard?’

‘I may have invented that as a joke. It was a casual, off duty meeting and there was no harm in telling her you were safe.’

‘I thought so. But the Committee is nervous about all of us, Gil. The planning is intricate, and one slip here or abroad …’

‘They haven’t any doubts about me, I hope?’

‘Not real doubts. And I can easily put it right. Can you let me know where you were between the fifth and the ninth of this month?’

‘Yes of course. Herbert Johnson was staying at Witney and doing the rounds of Oxford booksellers.’

‘Names?’

The slightest hesitation could be fatal. I wrote down the names for her. I had not been near any of them. It was a grave mistake not to have done so. I ought to have established better cover in case of trouble.

She was not so ungracious as to say that the booksellers would be visited and questioned, but I knew they would be. One or two might reply that they did not remember. Inconclusive but fairly damning. Some would be sure that I had not called recently.

The best I could hope for was that it would not occur to anyone that Witney was convenient for Gloucester as well as Oxford; if it did Ian Roberts would talk to the casual inquirer for quarter of an hour, saying what a nice chap I was and that he had sent me up with a book to Roke’s Tining.

Clotilde left, promising to return some other evening. She won’t find her Gil if she does. Even without Ian Roberts, there will be strong suspicion that I managed to identify Shallope and followed him to Roke’s Tining, I might be able to talk my way out of that, but when asked why I did it I have no answer which would stand up to ruthless interrogation.

I must leave at once. It’s unlikely that my movements will be watched while they are waiting for Clotilde to report. I don’t know what to do. My only hope of finding out where this abomination has been hidden was to exploit the trust the Committee had in me. The job is impossible alone. Fortunately Elise is safe. There’s no reason for them to suspect she was in Bristol and on the Cotswold roads with me if she keeps her mouth shut.

I have taken a room at a small boarding house in Ealing, dissolved among the directionless masses of an inner suburb. I feel that Ealing is an unlikely home for members of the Action Committee though their names and addresses are known only to themselves. As for my London cells, they are scattered through north and east and I only run a remote risk of one of them crossing my path in the centre of the city.

That is where I have been all day, studying faces, listening to scraps of conversation, detecting anger but as yet no anxiety. I have also tried to analyse the contents of the newspapers. They don’t let the death of Shallope alone. Columns are filled with wild speculation – for example that he was on to a method of exploding hostile weapons in their bunkers and was therefore assassinated by the KGB. Interviews with his colleagues are less sensational. He had not been directly employed on weapon production for several years and was known to be strongly opposed – in private life and common rooms – to the tactical bomb. MI5 may have considered him a very minor risk, but the extraordinary act of protest into which he had been so idealistically decoyed was beyond imagination.

I have the impression that editors-in-chief are either preparing the public for the news or encouraging the most fantastic stories because they do not want serious discussion too close to the bone. They must have been told the truth. After the release of Clotilde it would be natural for the Cabinet to have second thoughts and wonder whether the State had not surrendered to a bluff. Now there can be no more doubt. The news of Shallope’s death and an immediate call from Gammel to Scotland Yard must at once have filled Roke’s Tining with police and scientific experts.

Meanwhile London splutters with resentment at so much police activity. Cartoonists are having a field day with The Bowler-hatted Rabbits. The public is completely deceived by a Government statement that danger of lead poisoning from nineteenth-century water pipes has turned out to be more grave than expected and therefore advantage has been taken of the holiday season to measure the quantity of lead in sewers and at the same time test for radio-activity.

I am disappointed by the Prime Minister. In all his career there was never an issue he wouldn’t fudge or a half lie he wouldn’t tell. I don’t expect him to inform the people of London that they are about to be blown to bloody hell and call for a week of prayer; but a frank and courageous warning of expected terrorist activity without a mention of nuclear fission would have been more effective. Alternatively he might have blathered – and been believed – about proposed legislation to reduce water closets to one per family for the sake of social equality.

The streets are sprinkled with police cordons and plain vans parked over manholes. The rabbits who descend from them into the sewers are not in fact bowler-hatted but boiler-suited or white-coated. Traffic is disrupted, and insult is added to injury by the reference to the holiday season. Nobody but the master spirits of Whitehall would, say the public, consider London empty in August with an extra million of sightseeing foreigners flooding in and out of the Underground on their way to monopolising the places of amusement.

The people put in the foreground of their complaints this very minor example of bureaucratic stupidity because their hatred of the State, always extending its power on the excuse that it knows individual needs better than the individual, is unanalysed and inarticulate. Yet there are signs of genuine anger. The vans of the rabbits have been overturned and the police attacked when they came to the rescue. The doomed city is like a trapped animal. Something is wrong. It does not know what. It can no longer believe that the hands which push in its food – with twopence of – mean well and should not be bitten.

The social chaos which must precede the New Revolution is on the way to being created already. After another week, as lies and silences, hypocrisy and lack of leadership become obvious, discontent will seethe up from the collective subconscious; and as the police state closes down on the people the Commensals of Death will strike back, appearing as the defenders of the rights of the citizen.

The next stage is to let the people know the truth. Then we shall see stark terror, crowds fighting for the available transport and attempts to prevent by soothing words the general evacuation of the city. When it becomes known that Government, embassies and the herd of apparatchiks have already been quietly evacuated, indignation will be irrepressible.

The Committee may think it enough for the present to hold the weapon in reserve and exploit the fury. I do not know. But I am sure the final holocaust will never be used to demand power nor to force acceptance of social and financial policies. Such objectives are childish and unrealistic. It will be used without threat or warning to destroy the present for the sake of the future.

We gain a clean sheet and a precious interval in which human life is no longer subordinate to the requirements of profitable production. The State will revive, due to the use of its armed force to restore discipline, but also a still fiercer anger of the people revives. Then at last in small communities the ideals of the New Revolution begin to grow and offer an example of that content which can never be imposed from the top down, only from the bottom up.

The ideal remains my ideal but this short-cut to it, logical as it may be, is a denial of evolution. Even if there is no purpose whatever in the Universe and human life is no more sacrosanct than that of a chicken bred for broiling, I still have faith in both. Why?

I do not know. What is the connection between young Grainger who gave his life and the setting sun in Paxos? What has the herd instinct, which I assume is responsible for our acts of self-sacrifice, to do with pantheistic ecstasy? Is it this problem which the Early Fathers had in mind when they formulated the ingenious conception of a Triune God – a pleasant mystery to clergymen and horrifying to the literal-minded Mohammed. For me the voice which spoke to Job out of the whirlwind is more of a prohibition than the Sermon on the Mount. I must go on. I must not think it hopeless. I alone, the traitor, have inside knowledge. Not enough, but a little.

I think I should start by talking to Sir Frederick again. He is the only lead for me as for the police. As I see it Shallope discusses his needs with his supposed Ban-the-Bomb fanatics; but even they with all their contacts at home and abroad cannot lay their hands on a workshop where no curiosity will be aroused and his material can be safely delivered. Shallope himself solves the problem. He remembers or is reminded of the reverend baronet and Rake’s Tining. Thereafter Magma only requires the presence of Clotilde on the spot. The choice of Clotilde is easily explained. If she is recognised and questioned, the police are no nearer than they were before to identifying her political sympathies. But she must take exceptional precautions to avoid them. A more drastic change of appearance was required than mere fiddling with hair styles.

With Shallope dead and the existence of a finished bomb amply confirmed, Special Branch come up against an absolute blank except for Gammel. I imagine that half of them insist he is guilty and must be made to talk while a more intelligent half point out that anyone who has spoken to him for an hour must know he is innocent in spite of claiming to be a Christian Anarchist. In most countries that bold confession of faith combined with the fact that a nuclear bomb was constructed in his hospitable basement would ensure an unpleasant week with electrodes attached to his venerable testicles. I wonder how far the police will go in a desperate situation which justifies any means.

To approach Roke’s Tining is vilely dangerous. If stopped by the police I have to establish myself as the respectable Herbert Johnson before my fingerprints are taken and I am exposed as the best catch of the season: Julian Despard. I must also consider the risk of running into some of our own people who may not be far off. They could be expecting me if they are able to believe that I am mad enough to attempt single-handed opposition. Even if they think that I have only opted out my death is a necessity.

There was no reason why an honest man on a fine August day should not walk up the valley of the Churn making notes on its unparalleled domestic architecture of grey and gold. I found security beyond anything in my experience. Uniformed police were at each end of the Roke’s Tining estate; on the high ground on both sides of the wooded valley were several chaps in civilian clothes who did not seem to be doing anything agricultural. It looked impossible even to get a glimpse of house or courtyard without being questioned, and I could be sure that at the bottom of the valley were multiple activities as well organised as an ant heap. The only way to speak to the reverend baronet was to go in openly as Herbert Johnson, or rather Mr Johns.

Though the prospect of that appalled me, there was a fair chance that Gammel and the publishers’ rep could arrive at mutual trust. I was at ease with him and he with me and we both knew it. I do seem to have the gift of warmth in human relationships. My cell, I know, was a happy team of friends. Conceit! But a desperate man is entitled to encourage himself by contemplating his own virtues.

I telephoned Ian Roberts, pretending that on my last visit I had omitted to tell him of a window display which my firm could provide. When I mentioned that I had dropped the Kelmscot
News from Nowhere
on Sir Frederick Gammel and that he had received me very courteously, I got a flood of information back with all that Gloucester knew and conjectured.

It appeared, he said, that the nuclear physicist murdered in Bristol had been working at Roke’s Tining and it was believed that Sir Frederick’s well-known anarchism had been anything but Christian; he was suspected of experimenting with the manufacture of bombs. Police would not answer questions. The local paper said next to nothing for fear of libel. What was true was that the Roke’s Tining road had been closed and all persons working in the colony of craftsmen had been ordered out after interrogation. He knew one of them well – a metal worker who had done some machining for Shallope and reckoned that he had been working on an atomic bomb. Bloody nonsense! Was it likely?

‘By the way,’ he added when he had run out of gossip, ‘I had a relation of yours round here only a couple of days ago, asking if I would let him know the next time you called. I told him you had just been here. Edmund Johnson his name was, and he said he was a distant cousin of yours. He knew you worked for a firm of publishers but not which. I gave him your business address. Hope it was all right!’

I thanked him and asked him not to encourage this fellow who only wanted to borrow money.

So now the Action Committee knew for certain that I had tracked Shallope and recognised Clotilde. I had hoped for a longer delay. It was more urgent than ever to trust my intuition and take the gamble of interviewing the reverend baronet. When Roberts, returning to the subject of Sir Frederick, said that if he himself drove a car – which he never had – he’d go up to Roke’s Tining and tell him that he didn’t believe a word of whatever he was accused of. I replied that I would give his message if the police would let me in.

I hired a car. The expense gave me a curious sense of guilt, for I had gone off with a Group Commander’s reserve of cash amounting to a couple of hundred pounds. Although the rightful owners wanted my life a deal more than the money, I felt an embezzler. What a profound and human absurdity! Conscience sometimes seems to depend purely on a child’s upbringing.