Hostage (20 page)

From the lavatory window I had a view of the other side which was much as I expected. Backyards stretched the length of the terrace, separated by a wall from the backyards of the opposite terrace. Each little house had a projecting wing containing lavatory, bathroom and kitchen so that the ground plan was like two blunt combs with the teeth facing each other. I saw no easy way of escape in spite of the momentary cover to be obtained between the teeth. The police had only to close the ends of two streets and occupy three or four back windows overlooking the yards.

Back in the front room I waited and waited for some sign of activity. At last a car seemed worthy of close attention, for it was travelling a little too slowly. It was a black Cortina, not the green car, but it had the same two men in the front seat and now a woman behind. She was half turned away from my window and for one careless moment leaned forward to speak to he driver. It was Elise, taken along because she was capable of recognising me anywhere.

Then it was Magma not the police who were after me. My interest in Argyll Square was known since Elise would have spoken of the mission I had ordered. It could well be that No. 71 was now under more permanent surveillance and that my pause in front of it had given me away. But even so the pursuit did not make sense. Clotilde was safe. At any moment Gammel and I were about to share the fate of our fellow citizens. We could do no harm.

Yet it seemed they were not sure of that. I was considered a danger, however remote. In that case London was not going to die for a day or two. I asked myself why, why the delay? Wouldn’t the damned thing go off? Did they need a Shallope after all?

More probably it had to do with politics rather than physics. It was for the thinker rather than the active terrorist to guess the Committee’s programme. What a place it was in which to analyse the policy of the New Revolution – a mean front room, grease of bacon congealed on the plate, a pot of marmalade sticky with the fingers of unknown lodgers! But all familiar enough to Russian exiles at the beginning of the century.

Although Rex had let me into the secret as one of the most fanatical and dependable Group Commanders – dependent as well as dependable – he had told me little or nothing of the Action Committee’s strategy. The gist of what he did say I remembered – and have since looked it up in this diary:

‘Fear, Gil, fear! That will bring the chaos. Fear that can be revived as soon as it is forgotten. At any time we can renew the threat.’

He would be right if the Government had ever revealed that the threat is nuclear.

Therefore it could be, I thought, that they were waiting for the Government to come clean and order evacuation. The motive seemed inadequate if one considered London and only London. But Magma after all was international, and Mallant himself was almost certainly on the International Committee. Magma would not be exploiting the bomb to the full if they merely destroyed the capital and disrupted the social organisation of one country.

God help me, I had been one of the leading propagandists and yet I had managed to miss the proposed sequence of events! The bomb should come last, not first. Fire the terror before you fire the weapon. Spread the terror over the United Kingdom and across the Channel. Blackmail in Paris and the Ruhr. In Moscow, too, perhaps. Certainly in New York. One can imagine the effect on plain gullible Americans who were even prepared to accept that Martians had landed. And then when hysteria is out of control and reaction and disbelief about to begin, show that the threat is real and set the clock for the meeting of that little parcel of U235 with its mate.

The police were beaten. Magma had only one real danger to face. Me. Yet there in my Camden Town refuge I was not half so afraid of them as I had been of the police. Magma could not easily collect the manpower for this sort of job, especially since the London cells had been dispersed. Why did they do that at all, I wondered. There must have been a day when they did intend to let the bomb precede the terror – perhaps after the inexplicable search of Argyll Square. Me again. The prospect of execution sharpens the mind wonderfully, as my namesake, Dr Johnson, said.

Forcing the enemy to concentrate had worked better than I expected. If I had been dealing with the police, we should have had one hell of a chase through those backyards with the odds stacked against me. But Magma – well, there were two games they could play. The first was to walk in boldly, deal with me on the spot and run for it. I did not think they would risk that even if they believed I was off my guard. I was a trained urban guerrilla and presumably armed; if the first burst didn’t kill me outright, some of them were coming with me. That meant publicity with incalculable consequences.

The second expedient was to wait, close off the street with the black car at one end and the green at the other and stop and question me on the pretence of being police. If I didn’t stop they would shoot me down and race off; if I did, was collared and yelled for help, they would flash a police warrant at any interfering passer-by. Holding for questioning, law or no law, excuse or no excuse, must be becoming familiar to the citizens of London together with all the proper and conventional protests from liberal democrats. The police state was being forced to take over. At least we had been successful in that.

At the moment the well-publicised police activity was a serious handicap. If I walked out of the back door and climbed the party wall into the opposite premises the good woman was going to be alarmed, let alone the occupants of the houses through which I must go. Mick as wardrobe manager had overdone my stage costume. I was a nasty, long-haired lay-about just right to be an anarchist bomber. I could imagine the row of backyards buzzing like a wasp’s nest, with any able-bodied men who happened to be about providing the sting.

I went back to the lavatory window. Leaning far out and looking down the rank of yards I could see that my guess was correct. The black Cortina was waiting round the corner at the end of the row, invisible from the front of the house. The green car and its three occupants were out of sight, but it stood to reason that they were round the corner at the other end. It occurred to me that the police could be the kind deliverers of Julian Despard and that I might leave my hostess with a little romance in her life of letting lodgings, even perhaps with her picture in the paper and an enviable five-second appearance on the telly.

I went into the kitchen, paid for my breakfast and asked her if she would mind helping the police in a vital investigation. I had come to her house, I admitted, on false pretences. I was an agent of Special Branch, and my real reason had been to watch the street through her front window. She accepted the story without question. My personality had been pleasant, and she recognised that this new line fitted my speech and my account of myself much better than the dubious, mature student.

Would she, I asked, call the local police station for me, give her name and address and tell them that there were two suspicious cars, one at each end of the street, claiming to be police cars? I could not take action myself, but I was sure everybody would feel safer if a real police car checked their identity.

With great excitement she did what I asked, telling me that she had been thanked for her information and assured that the cars would be checked immediately.

I waited a couple of minutes and left, crossing to the other side of the street and walking slowly down it. Garbage was being collected and I was able to take cover behind the truck where I could just see the bonnet of the black Cortina. Meanwhile I talked to one of the dustmen, asking how I should apply for that rightly highly-paid work. I gathered that he didn’t think much of me as a possible colleague, and while we were talking a true police car crossed the bottom of the street and started to pull into the curb. I turned the corner, walked away unhurriedly and once out of sight ran for the first bus I saw. A pity I could not hear the conversation with the police! Probably my former associates had a plausible excuse for waiting which could, if necessary, be confirmed. That was a point impressed on all cell leaders.

So I travelled gratefully back to our basement and Sir Frederick, buying for him a pork pie, tomatoes and a quart of beer on the way. He was looking pleased with himself and told me he had been out and about. I was horrified and begged him not to take unnecessary risks. He adjusted his filthy scarf, bent his knees a little and began to hobble around the room. The white bristles on cheek and chin could have done with a further day’s growth, but in the clothes that Mick had provided he really did look a meth-soaked, revolting old man.

‘Would you recognise me?’

I admitted that I myself would not, but pointed out that he was badly wanted and dealing with expert detectives.

‘Amateur theatricals?’ I asked.

‘No, the theatricals of this life, Julian. An actor can never be a leader; he has too little self beyond the mirror. But a leader of men must be an actor. I could not have run Roke’s Tining without catching the imagination of my colony. Sometimes it was a strain when what they expected of me did not entirely correspond to reality.’

I mentioned that when I first observed him in his courtyard he was worried and grumbling to himself.

‘Very likely. A release of tension. Shallope was worrying me and I could see no reason why he should be.’

I said that I should not have thought his happy, productive Cotswold life could have given him much experience of the old and destitute slinking from one public bar to another.

‘If it had not, I should have felt too guilty to be happy. Always you remember the Anarchist and forget the Christian, Julian. No passer-by was ever refused a bed. No passer-by left Roke’s Tining, if I could help it, without new hope. Some returned often and some wrote me letters. Tramps grow mercifully fewer, and those that remain are frequently old and near death. That is how I know. I wish I could have given them my health and strength instead of imitating now their weakness and infirmities.’

An amazing companion, and right about leadership! Was there ever a successful general who was not an actor – at least to the extent that he created a commanding and attractive image of himself?

While he dealt with the pork pie and beer like a hungry youth, I asked him where he had been.

‘Not your Argyll Square, but wandering not far off. I was making myself known. I have a room in my daughter’s house, but she throws me out every morning because she says I smell and at night I go back. Smell, now,’ he added, starting on the second pint. ‘A distasteful necessity! Perhaps I can trust our present lodging to provide it. And this suit begins to exhale mementoes of its former owner.’

‘If you aren’t careful you’ll have some damned official wanting to know your daughter’s address.’

‘I am too vague for that. I just complain as the old do.’

I gave him some account of my day, telling him that I now believed Magma had put off the final decision.

‘Then we must be careful not to drive them to it,’ he said.

He had a point there. I wish Magma did not know that I and probably all three of us are in London.

Mick came to see us in the afternoon, bringing food and the evening papers. He expected to find us bored with inaction and was surprised that I was contentedly resting while I watched Gammel carving the outline of a beech, immediately recognisable, from a piece of broken wainscoting. After telling Mick of my narrow escape, I warned him that he too must be badly wanted by Magma.

We agreed that in future both of us were forced to keep clear of Argyll Square, yet we were up against a blank wall unless we could get the names and occupations of the tenants of No. 71.

‘Would not the police have them?’ Sir Frederick asked.

I pointed out that if Mick asked the police – he was the only one who could – he would have far too many questions to answer. Who was he? Why did he want to know? Whatever he replied, they would have him sitting in front of a table for hours while they checked his past and present.

‘I am aware of that,’ Sir Frederick said. ‘I was implying that if the police had all their names and could get no further, nor could we.’

Probably true, though I was not wholly convinced.

‘We do have another line,’ Mick reminded me. ‘Clotilde’s builder. You and I have a chance of tracking him down if we use our heads.’

I went over with him again the very little that I knew, only amounting to the fact that Clotilde, when Group Commander, had done something or been in on something which concerned both Argyll Square and William the Builder. She might have helped to negotiate a secret arms depot which later became the cache for the bomb. When I claimed to know where it was because I had been needed for some duty after the bomb had been moved from Hoxton, she accepted it.

‘You never told me that,’ Mick said.

‘It wasn’t important. After she had had time to think it over she knew it was a lie.’

‘Anything else you know about Hoxton?’

I said that one of my cells had been hotting up the strike at the Hoxton Redevelopment site working through International Marxists. When I came under suspicion of showing too much interest in Shallope, my partisans were called off by Clotilde who was able to do it because the cell leader had taken her orders for so long.

‘The bomb was lifted from Roke’s Tining to Hoxton?’

‘Yes. And the police were allowed to know it.’

‘Lord help the little International Marxists! All run in, were they?’

‘I don’t know. The strike was called off. When the papers played up the search of the site for explosives, public opinion was all for lynching the lot of them.’

Mick reminded me that he used to be an International Marxist himself.

‘I might find an old comrade at Hoxton. It’s worth a try. Do you think it’s safe, Gil?’

‘Nothing is safe. But I doubt if the committee has any more interest in Hoxton.’

‘If I go now, I’ll catch them coming out. See you tomorrow if there’s anything to report!’

He said they’d be a thirsty bunch of buggers when they knocked off, so I gave him ample funds for beer. I still have enough to finance our cell of three and our escape, but I don’t see a possible life ahead and I don’t think there will be three. As the reverend baronet put it, I shall do my duty where conscience leads.