Hostage (6 page)

Her presence at first puzzled me but it made sense. She had to lie low and could no longer function as a Group Commander. But one must remember Magma’s unvarying principle of limiting top secret information to the least possible number. Clotilde was too valuable to be left unemployed. If she were used to shadow Shallope and see that there was no interference with him, it was unnecessary to let still another of our people into the secret of his work.

She talked to Shallope for ten minutes or so and then left. It was very possible that she had given him a time and place, both so explicit that it was better to risk the personal visit than to telephone. She came past the garage and I hoped to God that she would not look into it; as my former Group Commander she knew very well the number of Herbert Johnson’s car. She passed on safely down the drive and was joined at the gate by her bodyguard.

Half an hour later Shallope left the hotel for the garage, and I heard him beneath me fussing with his car. I say fussing because he got out after he had started up and opened the bonnet though there was nothing whatever wrong with the sound of the engine. He re-entered the car and again got out, slamming the door twice. Either he always double checked non-existent faults – perhaps a built-in precaution for a man accustomed to tinker with nuclear fission – or he had been reading in his morning paper about car bombs. My mental picture of a nervous man, easily perturbed, was confirmed. More important, I was able to note the number of his blue Cortina when he drove away.

I had to remain in my loft till the hotel and its guests were occupied with lunch and it was safe to assume that Clotilde had returned home, wherever that was, or joined Shallope at a rendezvous. Then I drove back to the quiet lane in which I had originally left my car and sat down on warm, short turf to think and look at the map with Cheltenham spread out at my feet and the steep escarpment of the Cotswolds behind.

Some reasonable deductions could be made. The unhesitating use of the cedar meant that the hotel had been thoroughly reconnoitred beforehand – chosen for Shallope rather than by him. He was working on or had made the bomb. Where? Clotilde’s visit and the holiday in Cheltenham suggested that the crate of U235 was not far away.

However, none of that is of much help now that Herbert Johnson thinks it over again in the privacy of his bedroom after dinner. I dare not follow him. Somebody – Clotilde? – will be ordered to keep a look-out for any car sticking persistently to his tail until he is safely clear and can continue on alone. The map shows that perhaps I need not follow. That choice of a quiet hotel just below the hills suggests that he is bound for some remote spot in the Cotswolds. If he is, I can narrow down the possibilities from all Gloucestershire to a few square miles. But I can’t watch the road junction alone. Shall I call for Elise? Like so many of our women she would die rather than talk. Deadlier than the male all right – because, I think, they want to prove that they have all the ideal ruthlessness of the male, which in fact does not exist.

Elise turned up at Witney in the early afternoon, dark, dedicated, her grey eyes always reminding me of sheet lightning behind a cloud. I explained the position to her as if we were not happy about Shallope’s movements. We wanted to know where he went when he drove away from the hotel. He might be merely visiting a relative or might be double-crossing Magma, perhaps blackmailed by someone who knew he had been involved in arms smuggling. It was essential that he should never know he was being watched.

I could see that she was surprised that I, as Group Commander, should be engaged on a routine job rather than one of my cell leaders; so I told her that those were my orders from the Committee because my cells were mostly industrial – which was true – and my cover and experience in a rural environment much better than theirs would be.

The job, I said, might take us a day or two. The first move was to spot Shallope returning to his hotel in the evening. Starting with the assumption – which might be wrong – that he was spending his days in the Cotswolds, not in the vale, he must pass one of two road junctions on his way home: Andoversford and Seven Springs.

I sent Elise to Andoversford which was the busier of the two. There was a chance that someone might recognise me, whether as Gil or Herbert Johnson, whereas she was unknown. I left it to her to choose the best positions and method. I took Seven Springs, safely tucked in behind a dry-stone wall. When I picked her up in the dusk we found that we had drawn a blank. No blue Cortina of the number.

We tried again this morning, changing posts. She got him at Seven Springs at 9.45. He turned sharp left at the cross-roads, a move which should have brought him past me but did not; so he either followed the road to Northleach or one of the little by-roads running south. I took her off to a good and well-deserved lunch and we had another shot in the evening at spotting Shallope’s return. Northleach road blank. Elise in luck again. He must have come out of a lane leading up from one of the valleys, and alongside him in the car was a youngish man with a fair, fluffy beard and a hat. Elise had done brilliantly and I told her so. When I drove her into Oxford to catch a train back to London she did not seem quite in her usual form. Too silent.

Today Herbert Johnson took over the action from Gil – Gil who now seems to be infected by bourgeois morality and is a traitor to his principles. I must forget Gil and remember that there was once a Julian Despard who taught what he believed to be true regardless of the consequences.

That ghost, Johnson, has contacts which have often proved useful. One of them is old Ian Roberts. He has been in love with his county since he was a boy and at one time wrote a column in the weekly paper. Landowners, the canons, the amateur historians and archaeologists, he knows all of them who are serious readers and they may borrow as well as buy from his bookshop in the shadow of Gloucester Cathedral.

What happens to cathedrals when the New Revolution is a fact? The infinite values in the earlier traditions of our ancestors must, I think, be treasured. In any case the appreciation of beauty, though it may be inarticulate, is above all else. There can be nothing against olive groves descending to blue sea or against a glory of architecture, yet one has to analyse what is in favour. It seems that for me the New Revolution implies a New Religion. I wish I was back among my books or even in prison with time to think. The man of action must be taking a day off.

I called on Roberts. Herbert Johnson’s firm is running a series of popular histories for the pig ignorant, and I intended to persuade him that he need not be ashamed to see them on his shelves. He took me into the back office for a chat and a glass of sherry. His middle-aged daughter does the selling while he attends to the buying and – though he’d be horrified at such a term – the public relations. He was impressed by the academic distinction of some of our authors and gave me a trial order. With that out of the way, I told him that I had spent a few long evenings exploring the Cotswolds and had been impressed by the timeless, well-timbered valleys around the headwaters of Colne and Churn. I said that it was like a return to the England of two hundred years ago, leading him on to tell whatever he knew about the inhabitants.

‘And earlier than just two hundred,’ he replied. ‘The Romans liked our valleys as well.’

He carried on about the collapse of Roman civilisation which continued to flourish only on the country estates of the villas. Then his chins shook with a chuckle and he said that I should talk to the Reverend Sir Frederick Gammel about that. Sir Frederick believed that not only were we going the same way but that we ought to.

I said that I thought baronets who were also clergymen had pretty well disappeared since the time of Jane Austen.

‘Mr Johnson, there’s a flood of houses and people all over us but you’d be surprised how many quiet little islands are left in it. I have a valued customer on Severnside who worships the gods of Greece.’

‘The craze for the occult?’

‘Not at all! He’s protesting against it in a way. Blue skies, white marble, flowered meadows and no nonsense – that’s his ideal. Founded on fallacies just like your ideals and mine. He forgets the mysteries and the whispers of human sacrifice that a gentleman didn’t mention. And yet the farmhouse he lives in is as old as Adam with a well-attested elemental popping in and out of the river mists. Beowulf and the Wagner stuff should be his line, but there’s no accounting for some folk. Well, he’s got the flowered meadows all right. You should see ’em in June! You won’t believe me, Mr Johnson, but fifty years ago I could bathe naked a mile above Wainlode and not a chance that anyone would pass!’

I saw that he was about to take me up the Severn with the salmon whereas I wanted to get him talking about hill coverts where Shallope spent his days among foxes and badgers. That baronet in holy orders also sounded interesting. So I asked him, picking up his metaphor, what sort of island in the flood Sir Frederick was. An eccentric village parson?

‘Not he! He’d set his heart on being a college chaplain, or so one of the cathedral canons told me.’

‘That must have been a long time ago.’

‘Well, he’s close on seventy, or over.’

Not very helpful. But Roberts went on to say that when Gammel inherited the estate of Roke’s Tining along with the title he had at once turned it into a cooperative of craftsmen and workers on the land.

‘An econut?’

‘No. I hear his farming is quite normal and up to date. Spinning and weaving from his own wool, iron-working, thatching – those are what he’s crazy about, together with a wheelwright’s shop and I don’t know what else. He’s preserving it all for the smash. Inflation, pollution, nuclear fallout, disease, all the things they threaten us with. When the New Revolution they talk about comes along he’s just the man to run you up a pony trap, and I’ve still got the hitching post outside you can tie up to.’

We had a little more half-humorous, doom-watching conversation and then he said:

‘Well, you could do me a favour, Mr Johnson, and judge for yourself if you’re so interested. Take this up to him with my compliments and see if he wants it. He’ll post it back to me if he doesn’t.’

It was a first edition of the Kelmscot Press
News from Nowhere.
I have the book now. Only when I was driving back to Witney did I realise that it would look odd to deliver a book on foot, demanding some weak explanation such as wanting exercise. But I am not risking a car down there. I want to see before I am seen.

Yesterday I breakfasted at Northleach and left my car in the inn car park a safe six miles from Roke’s Tining. My plan, so far as I had any, was to avoid approach from Cheltenham and come in from the east through largely wooded country, then looking down on Sir Frederick and his community from the high ground above the valley.

That turned out to be impossible. I could see nothing. Roke’s Tining was much as an Anglo-Saxon settlement must have been – a forest clearing alongside running water. So I took to the cover, keeping off anything that looked like a path in case this was Shallope’s workshop and he was guarded. I was fairly sure he would not be unless Clotilde was there monitoring his mood as Rex had said. The general principle is never to put out sentries over, say, a bomb factory or a meeting unless something has gone badly wrong. If sentries are needed the focal point must be so unimaginatively chosen that it should not be used at all.

The front of the house looked south-east down a narrow, wooded valley with grass on one side of the stream and the road on the other. It was a simple Jacobean manor of Cotswold stone, warm and contenting as the Cotswold wool which had paid for it. Under the gaze of those mullioned windows I could not take the road or the meadows and made my way past the house along the slope. The beeches were thick on the ground, smelling of fox. Progress had to be very slow to be silent. It would be a waste of time to teach jungle movement to urban guerrillas, but if I were on the Action Committee I should like to have at my disposal a Group Commander who knew the drill. Well, two weeks ago they still had one in Gil and for all I know there may be others.

When I was high on the steep side of the valley, well above the decorative chimneys of the house, I looked down into a flagged courtyard between wings which had been invisible from the front. The far wing was wholly agricultural: barns, storeroom and a modern milking parlour. The workshops appeared to be in the near wing of which I could only see the roof. Chimneys there were industrial rather than decorative. Up the valley, closing the end of the courtyard but well away from it, was a large building, higher than the rest, which had been a tithe barn. This had a considerable chimney above which the air danced and quivered with heat.

Somewhere a circular saw was screaming but there was no sound of any power plant. Through the trees at the head of the valley I caught the gleam of water. It was a mill pond. Sir Frederick was consistent in his doom-watching; he was running his estate from a waterwheel. He had not rejected petrol for transport, however. There were two tractors in the courtyard and Shallope’s car.

One must always have patience in attack, over and above the patience expected by the enemy. I was prepared to stay where I was all day and the next if necessary. Patience paid off. I began to know my reverend baronet from his occasional appearances. He looked no older than the late fifties, white-haired, slender, tall, with his head thrust forward. His tweed and breeches suggested a caricature of an old-fashioned farmer, right down to leather leggings which I had never seen before. When he was alone he had a set expression of worried vigilance, like a fine old cock with disobedient hens, and was inclined to mutter to himself; in contact with any other person he was at once genial. I felt the geniality was in character, not the well-trained pose of our business rats.

At one o’clock I was reminded of a monastery. A bell over the arched entrance closing the courtyard rang. Out of the workshops trooped eight men and women going in to a communal lunch. No sign of Dr Shallope. I assumed that he was somewhere inside the house. Gammel evidently put his trust in God and nuclear science or else he did not know what he had under his roof.