Hostage (25 page)

I tore off eastwards, looking for somewhere to abandon the car. Among the crowd rushing towards the tabernacle when the dust had settled someone must have noticed colour and number and the clergyman with a rifle in his hand. It was unlikely that I had more than five minutes before a complete description of me was coming over the radio in every police car.

It then occurred to me that one of the station car parks was the obvious refuge and, better still, one of the many depots and goods yards behind St Pancras. After ripping off my clerical collar I turned into the first I saw. Nobody paid any attention to me and I had time to think I was wedded to that rifle. Clotilde’s .32 had only two rounds left in the magazine – not enough for the incalculable future of Despard. All the same I had no lunatic intention of taking the rifle with me down my leg and under my coat until I saw on the back seat a green, hooded cloak which Clotilde must have used to obscure her face while driving through London streets.

So I rolled my awkward friend in her cloak, securing the ends with the parson’s dicky ripped in half. A damned odd parcel! But with its neat black bows at each end it looked respectable. A sapling from my garden to plant on grandpa’s grave perhaps. Nobody showed any curiosity about it when I dived into the Underground.

At Liverpool Street I took the first bus I saw, then got off and walked a little and took another bus, hoping that I had thrown off direct pursuit and could go safely home to the basement. The danger of being recognised as the bomber had wiped out all fear of being spotted by some brilliant constable or passing police car as a possible Julian Despard.

I slipped safely and unobtrusively into the squattery. Several of the idle on doorsteps must have seen me arrive. I could only hope that they had not looked closely enough to identify the long-haired, tee-shirted lay-about, the visiting parson who had left at breakfast time and this latest caller arriving with a roll of secondhand carpet as one and the same person.

Sir Frederick was sitting on his bedroll with his back against the wall, outwardly calm and now carving the silhouette of an ash to accompany his beech. The tranquillity of the man was superb. He could live on a desert island with his faith to preserve his spirit and a couple of sharpened oyster shells to add something new to his restricted world.

I told him where the bomb had been and how I had disabled it. I omitted any mention of Mallant and Clotilde but it was harder to leave out McConnell. By this time Gammel knew my face and expression too well. My curt story of locking the churchwarden in the vestry made him jump to the right conclusion.

‘You can tell me if he was injured by the explosion,’ he said.

‘Yes. He is dead.’

‘Will the police know you are responsible, directly or indirectly?’

I replied that they would at least know I was among those present. In fact they must have had three murders chalked up to my account, not reckoning Jim Ridge.

‘And that parcel is the rifle?’

‘Yes. I thought I had better not leave it.’

He said that he would make it the work of what remained of his life to see that justice was done to me. I let that go. A fat chance he had! I had helped to smuggle in the uranium. I was in the secret till I could no longer bear it. The judge, anxious to believe the shreds it was possible to believe, might ask me if I never had any respect for human life, to which I could only answer: as much and as little as a soldier.

No, it is more likely that in the future, if I can escape, it will be I who tries to ensure that justice is done to my reverend baronet.

We have decided that on the whole it is better to remain where we are until we have seen the evening papers. Unfortunately we have no radio. Nor do we know where to go.

It is unbelievable. Yet I should have foreseen that the first thought of any democratic government announcing that an atomic bomb had been found and disarmed would be: how many votes are in it for us?

On and on goes the now-it-can-be-told communiqué, modestly emphasising the agonising decisions of the Cabinet to give a little here and to resist blackmail there. The skill and patience of our gallant police in their exhaustive inquiries is very properly mentioned, with the revelation that they were in hourly touch with the Prime Minister and Home Secretary. I’ll bet they were – with the politicians of course at a safe distance from London. Then we have the customary compliment to the citizens who did not panic in spite of rumours and the meaningless threats of social nihilism. That ‘meaningless’ is shameless impudence, implying that the Government was in command of the situation throughout.

And yet for anyone reading between the lines a month hence – if anyone ever bothers to look back at what the politicians said a whole month before – it should be obvious that the police had nothing whatever to do with the discovery of the bomb.

The plain facts of the story, so far as the newsmen have been able to master them, are correct. We have the death of Alexandra Baratov by a premature explosion (why at the wrong end?) and the murder of Mr Ivor McConnell of 71 Argyll Square – according to the pastor of the tabernacle, a faithful servant of the Lord ever foremost in the fight against the insidious advances of our misguided Roman brethren.

The car has been found; it had false number plates. Julian Despard, alias Herbert Johnson, and Sir Frederick Gammel are wanted by the police. Inner pages give their life stories, Sir Frederick’s is not so full of gaps as mine and, he assures me, a remarkable feat of imagination in the very short time the writer had to compose it. He is concerned about the headline MAD BARONET. He has always considered himself healthy in mind and body.

There is no word of Mallant. I wonder what he did. Well, he had the same five minutes before the arrival of police that I myself counted on. It might not have been too difficult to hide between pews and join the first bold spirits to enter the tabernacle. He will still remain unsuspected even when fingerprints are taken from the car. His must be somewhere on it as well as mine, but it’s a thousand to one his are not on record. In any case it will be taken for granted that I drove the car with Clotilde at my side.

Sir Frederick looked a question at me when he read of the death of Clotilde. I had to expand my story to show that I had not intended it. But was I to allow her to re-set the timing of the bomb? He only remarked:

‘God forgive the girl! There was so much splendour in her.’

I could have said Amen to that if I were able to forget the fair hair with no head beneath it and remember her as she was.

We have some food, but both of us could do with a stiff drink. We must not show ourselves. I wish I had not let Mick go.

This is the last entry. How curious that they should think of Julian Despard as a hardened killer and yet on his record how right – for I have committed still another murder, to them the coolest and most inexplicable of all.

They are trying to talk me into surrender. They even have a psychiatrist to help. I’d love to engage the fool in argument but I haven’t the leisure for that. I’m busy. Every time that he and the police interrupt me, trying to discover what makes me tick, I lay down my pencil and put a shot through the top of the door to silence them.

What does make me tick? If I don’t know, he can’t. So let them go on believing that I am a paranoiac with an itch to shoot policemen. They have such patience. It would be simple to open up with a sub-machine gun from across the road so that I was pinned to the floor, but they won’t. We are still a long way from that police state which Magma and I hoped to create, and yet we were right to foretell the fury of the people when crazed by fear and revenge. Brutes! Have they any other standard of civilisation than the lust for more and more possessions and the hope of Twopence Off?

I should know them. I myself, safely in the background, have employed a handful of rent-a-crowd agitators to fan a minor grievance into flaming resentment.

But I must get on with my record of the facts. The end came quickly this morning. I suspect that some responsible citizen, forced by misfortune to join himself to our band of street-invading rats, noticed the departure of the dubious clergyman and his uncollared return and went to the police with his report. When he added that, so far as he knew, the only inhabitants of the ruin were a long-haired derelict of uncertain age and an old man it was worth a reconnaissance in force.

As soon as I saw the cars draw up outside I hurried Sir Frederick to the top of the house together with the arms and this diary which could for him have been the best protection of all. The basement was impossible to defend, so I allowed the police to come up as far as the next landing below us. There I stopped them, warning that I would shoot to kill. Gammel was well aware that I did not mean it and was playing for time. He thought I had a plan. I didn’t. There was no hope.

They tried toughness at first.

‘Come out, Despard! We’ve got you.’

My answer to that was to smash the light fitting over their heads with Clotilde’s automatic. The shot impressed them. They settled down to the siege and began their technique of talking us out. From the window I saw television cameras arrive. The ends of the street became dark with people. A truck drove up and extended into the sky a steel skeleton like a fire ladder but with no ladder. I had a box on top, evidently designed to inconvenience me in some unknown way, so I put a couple of rifle bullets through it.

That was pointless and had its effect on Sir Frederick. He was seeing a side of me which was unfamiliar. What did poor Clotilde call it? Battle-happy. But there was no longer anything to battle for.

He demanded that I should trust the police, sending him out to explain to them all I had done. I replied that they were not likely to pay much attention. On the evidence of the papers all England appeared to believe that what he and Shallope had made was infinitely more criminal than the supposed quarrels and killings between anarchists which had helped to destroy their handiwork.

He continued to insist and I could only make surrender easy for him. So I threw out a note saying that he wished to give himself up and would come out unarmed and with his hands behind his head. It’s beyond imagination to think of him armed. But at times surrender can panic the opponent as much as attack.

‘The truth will prevail, Julian,’ he said boldly.

Like Pilate I asked what is truth, took his hand between both of mine and covered his quick exit through the door.

Well, what is it? For perfect justice to be done I should receive the George Cross and a life sentence simultaneously – a little beyond the imagination of our apparatchiks. One would need a Haroun al Rashid for that.

Through the window I watched him appear from the basement between two plain-clothes police with the regulation blanket over his head. They put him in the Black Maria, got in themselves and closed the doors. The police at the bottom of the street – a mere three or four of them holding back the crowd for the sake of safety – cleared a way for the van as casually as if directing traffic. There was no cordon. In fact the departure of Sir Frederick was a perfect example of how a regrettable incident should be quietly tidied up in a civilised country. And then I had to watch that fulfilment of Magma’s prophecy when the people would take justice into their own hands.

There were not more than half a dozen ringleaders. I could spot them from my window as police on the ground could not.

‘Get him! He made it. That’s the bloke who made it!’

The crowd surged forward on to the van, upsetting it. The few traffic police were overrun. Then someone – can you pick out in a pack of wolves the one who takes the first bite? – threw a match into the leaking petrol. Prisoner and escort escaped the flames by leaping out at the back, and the crowd closed over them. One of the C.I.D. men was hurled out like a ball from a rugger scrum. The police covering the front of my house abandoned their watch to race to the aid of their colleagues. Some high officer, brave enough to defy the law and the consequences, gave the order to fire over the heads of the mob. That dispersed them and left an empty space in which was a lonely, crumpled, flattened bundle of old clothes. Near Sir Frederick was one man of his escort who could crawl and another who lay still.

The police made some arrests at random, unlikely to be the active rioters. They, more experienced, had managed to tunnel through to the back of the crowd in time. A little beyond the burning van a well-dressed man was disdainfully walking away along the pavement, his whole appearance expressing disgust for the hysteria of the mob in which he had accidentally been caught up. That prowling gait was familiar to me. When he stopped for a moment to say something to an Inspector – no doubt offering his name and address as a witness – I saw his face and beard. He would of course be nearby. It was essential for him to know that both Sir Frederick and I were safely dead or, if we were not, to prepare his plans accordingly.

Mallant did not forget much but he had forgotten the rifle. I reckoned that in all the excitement the watchers would not yet be back at their posts, so I took the risk of kneeling at the window and resting the Lee Enfield on the sill. The range was about a hundred and fifty yards and the rifle not dead accurate. I hit him in the body with the first shot and had no way of telling if the wound was mortal. The Inspector at once leaned over him but his head was exposed. I tried again and this time there was no doubt.

They will wonder why such a crack shot chose a harmless bystander and left without a mark the uniform above him. That may be clearer when they read this diary unless I am prejudged to be a homicidal lunatic and Mallant above suspicion. As for Rex, the full resources of the police should be enough to establish his identity. When I was a Group Commander under him I was content not to know it. Afterwards it did not matter to me who he was.

I have removed the miniature incendiary from the cover of my diary. I started it as an aide-memoire in an intricate, ever-changing position. I went on as if it were a headquarters war diary, recording events and plans for action which needed to be discussed within a conference of myself. And recently I have seen it as the only witness able to exonerate that revered companion who trusted and comforted me. My evidence in court would be tainted. The evidence of my diary after my own death will ring true.