The Partridge Kite (11 page)

They and their instructor ignored Haig as he strode to the middle of the paddock watching. He stood there, hands on hips akimbo, legs far apart.

Tom walked up slowly behind him. The instructor shouted something and the men began chanting as they ran, a deep musical chant and Tom then remembered it from his own Service training days. . . RIGHT - TWO - THREE - LEFT - TWO - THREE . . . over and over again.

And something else struck him as he watched. They had precision, they had discipline, they were used to each other, used to singing and running together. These were not men training - these were men already trained. And exceptionally well-trained.

‘One of our top squads, McCullin!’ Haig dropped the ‘Mr’ for the first time. Tom was immediately aware of it and he felt on edge though he couldn’t quite make out why.

‘How top is top, Colonel?’ he asked, as flippantly as he could.

‘Very top indeed. They are all ex-servicemen, some with half a lifetime of service, most with experience in action - Aden, Cyprus, Ulster, even some of my own lads from Malaya. There’s also a couple of dozen in this squad that saw some fighting in Rhodesia, the Congo and Angola.’

‘Is there any firearms training here. Colonel?’

‘Of course not, McCullin - remember I told you earlier that we are prevented by law from that. Couldn’t even teach them how to use a twelve-bore to down a pheasant. . . the few who don’t already know, that is!’

The squad around them continued their chanting even louder than before. . . they were now circling, still the same pounding beat. . . RIGHT - TWO - THREE - LEFT - TWO - THREE . . . on and on . . . around the two spectators at their centre.

‘So,’ Tom said to Haig, ‘physical fitness, and lessons in British Constitution, Sociology and Civil Defence - that’s the sum total of what I’m going to film?’

‘Ah! Yes, your film, McCullin!’ Haig looked across to him, the grey eyes staring but giving the impression they saw nothing.

The men in blue were now much closer, their chanting much louder, their circle closing inwards quite rapidly. It sounded like a Zulu war dance, the kind Tom had heard on Sunday mornings in South African goldmines. He found he was beating the time of the rhythm with his left foot.

‘McCullin,’ Haig shouted across to him, above the noise, ‘can you read without glasses?’

‘Of course!’ Tom felt a pounding in his wrists and temples. The noise was beginning to tighten his stomach muscles.

Haig moved a pace forward nearer to Tom. Then read this,’ he said. He handed Tom the notepad Gosling had given him back half an hour ago in the warm sitting-room.

At the top of the notepaper were five words. . . those Tom had counted as Haig had written them. ‘CHECK WITH GRANADA I’M SUSPICIOUS.’

Underneath in another hand, probably Gosling’s, was written, ‘UNKNOWN TO GRANADA OR SEPARATE UNIONS’.

The chanting men were now within yards of Tom and Haig - he could almost touch them, he could smell their sweat.

‘Your reactions are slow, McCullin, if that your name,’ Haig shouted. ‘No let-out? No alternative line?’

Tom looked straight into Haig’s eyes and threw the notepad almost casually back to him, but said nothing. He turned to move. . . just a half-turn to the right, but he got no further. He felt a sudden sharp pain on his neck just below his left ear and his knees crumpled beneath him. As he went down he glimpsed the white fresh young face of Gosling. He sprawled at his feet, saw the black boots, caught the smell of boot polish, heard the thunderous roar of men chanting RIGHT - TWO - THREE as his head exploded in pain. He remembered no more.

The medical officer on Haig’s staff injected Tom’s unconscious body with a mixture of Pentothal and Valium, enough to keep him in a semi-conscious state for twelve hours or more. Tom, when he recovered from the hard blow to the nerve, would be vaguely aware of light, sound and movement but would not have the strength to do anything but lie still. He would be disorientated and might, under an interrogator’s skill and with the continued use of the drugs, talk quite freely, feel no guilt, and later remember nothing.

Haig’s men had searched his clothes but the contents gave them little help in establishing who he was. The signature on his driving licence corresponded with those on the three credit cards in his wallet. They corresponded with the signature in the visiting-book that Tom had signed in front of the two guards when he had arrived.

‘So we can assume he is who he says he is,’ Haig said to Gosling. Both men were standing, one on either side of the fireplace. Gosling leant down and threw another yew log into the fire-basket.

‘But
what
is he?’ Haig continued. ‘Not police. At least, not from this end or we’d have been tipped off by Sergeant Fowler. And no one from the Yard would come down here on his own - again not without Dartmouth CID knowing. He’s not a Pressman, not masquerading as a TV producer - there’d be no point; most of them in their bloody trade know there’s no way in here. That’s why I had my suspicions when he rang this morning. Thought I’d do a bit of the fly and the spider, just to see what he was up to.’

Gosling was looking into the fire; the pleasant scent from the burning yew sap was filling the room. Haig sat down in his armchair. Gosling moved to do the same, to the one where Tom had been sitting. Tom had left his pile of newspapers on the arm of the large floral covered wingback and Gosling began shuffling them together, to throw them into the log-basket on his left. But he stopped, pulled the
Daily Telegraph
from the top of the pile and stared at the crossword puzzle.

He handed it across to Haig. The puzzle was nearly finished and in the blank margins of the page, Tom, during his train journey down, had filled them with anagrams, half- written words and doodlings. He’d put a line through each of the clues as he’d solved them. Fourteen across, an anagram, hadn’t taken him long. ‘Conrod broken in a roundabout way (6).’ He had rearranged the letters in turn until the right word appeared and in his doodling working on the next clue had surrounded it with snakes and flowers and a jagged herringbone pattern so that this one word alone stood out bold from the others. Few people would have distinguished the six letters from the fantasies surrounding them. But Gosling saw them. And so now did Haig. By a freak 14 across, CORDON stood out as large as life.

Haig was on the telephone for a little over three minutes, giving his code and alert warning as CORDON Director Area 14.He informed Headquarters of the prisoner McCullin still unconscious upstairs. He assumed his instructions would be straightforward enough. They were, but not what he’d expected.

He came back into the sitting-room slowly through the curtains looking puzzled and angry.

‘He’s to be released without further delay or further harm.’

His silent adjutant looked up in surprise.

‘Yes, released,’ Haig continued. ‘I’m told the instructions came directly from the Chairman himself. It seems McCullin is an agent for SSO, Kellick’s mob of gangsters, but for Christ knows what reason we have to let him go.’

He paused and began stroking his nose with the stub of his forefinger. Gosling stood up and walked to the side of his Colonel waiting for orders.

‘I must presume,’ Haig said, ‘that our alert will at least be circulated to other Area Directors so we’ve done some service today. But what their game is at HQ I’ve no bloody idea. Dear boy,’ he turned and tugged at Gosling’s sleeve, ‘find out the time of the next London train.’

No one on Newton Abbot station was too put out as the two smiling pleasant-faced young men helped the older drunk along the platform. They were each side of him, his arms around their shoulders, their hands clasping his firmly. The older man looked white, and although his eyes were just open his head rolled from side to side in rhythm with the striding youngsters. They put him into a compartment on his own, a first-class non-smoker, and propped him up in the comer corridor seat. One pulled open his shirt collar and tie, the other emptied a quarter of a bottle of whisky into his open mouth; it splashed and dribbled down each side of his chin on to his chest and was absorbed by the cloth of his jacket. The return half of his ticket was placed in his top pocket for the ticket collector to see and take without disturbing him.

As the 1643 Penzance-London pulled away the two smiling young men handed their platform tickets to the collector at the barrier.

‘One and a half bottles of whisky for lunch - not bad going, eh?’ They laughed as they shouted to him.

The collector, ice cold in his unheated sentry-box, stamped his feet and nodded back wearily, wondering where on earth people got their money from nowadays, with whisky at £8.25 a bottle!

In the granite Headquarters of CORDON and in the darkened room where only the Chairman was allowed, the leather folder had been opened and closed for the second time in two days, and a second name had been ringed by the red wax marker.

Despite the arrival of Tom’s dragged and unconscious body at Paddington Station and the anonymous telephone call from a Dartmouth public call box alerting the Department of his estimated time of arrival, Kellick was still not convinced of the necessity to start dealing directly with Tom and to drop the charade of Trygg-Ö-Säker Security Malmö. That would mean crossing the Prime Minister and he would need much more persuasion to do that.

It came within hours.

Tom’s arrival at Paddington caused no commotion: the telephone call had ensured that. His body was strapped to a stretcher and carried the forty yards of platform seven into a waiting Departmental Rover.

For the sake of the records and Kellick’s suspicious mind, having been told by the two pickup men that McCullin stank of whisky, a blood test was made. It showed only the slightest evidence of alcohol - probably no more than a sherry or two, according to the doctor.

He also established the identity of the drug and said it would take another four hours, probably more, before Tom recovered consciousness. The bruise on the neck would cause some headaches for a day or two.

Tom was taken shortly after midnight in the grey Rover back to his flat in Russell Street and put to bed fully clothed. The two pickup men checked the flat for rear entrances, were satisfied there were none and went back to their car to sit the night out, listen to a West German pop station and drink sugarless, milkless tea from a vacuum flask. Their instructions were to alert the Duty Night Officer by radio the moment Tom stirred.

Neither knew the identity of this drunk who wouldn’t wake up. They assumed he was either an MP who, as one put it, had been caught ‘dipping his wick’ or a senior civil servant who’d broken up. And as Tom looked far too scruffy to be a civil servant, he became an MP. Either way they didn’t give much for his future.

Kellick left the Department for his flat in South West London after he’d watched the Rover leave Victoria Street with Tom’s body huddled in blankets on the back seat. Fry was sleeping out what was left of the night on a bunk in the Duty Night’s office.

For two days now the temperature had been five degrees below freezing, exceptionally cold even for a London December. The snow on the pavements was packed hard. During the day the traffic in the streets softened the surface slightly but at night it turned back again to ice. The taxi crunched its way across Parliament Square and over Westminster Bridge.

The plastic seats in the taxi themselves felt like smooth black ice and the chill from them moved through Kellick’s trousers. He shivered with the cold and the sense of total frustration.

His row half an hour before with Fry, and his own uncharacteristic loss of temper, was upsetting. He felt that everything he touched had been touched first by CORDON. Every move he made was pre-empted by CORDON. Every decision he took seemed to be working to their advantage.

The taxi smelt of stale tobacco. He crossed his arms about him and leant forward on to his knees in an effort to keep warm.

They’re playing cat and mouse with us,’ Fry had said in the office. ‘They could have held McCullin - they could comfortably have killed him. We had no idea he’d gone to Haig.’

Kellick had said nothing.

Fry went on, ‘Maybe they knew he was coming. Maybe they wanted to question him. The doctor said that drugs are frequently used during interrogation. Either way they’ve gone a few steps further forward and we’re marking time. We thought there would be a chase with us doing the chasing. We seem to have got it all wrong.’

Still Kellick had refused to answer.

Fry continued, ‘I suggest the pretence has gone on long enough. I suggest we go to McCullin the moment he wakes up and tell him exactly what it’s all about. I think he should meet Sanderson, interview him
himself.
I’m sure the Prime Minister would. . .’

‘You suggest! You think! You’re sure the Prime Minister will bloody well what. Fry?’ Kellick spat out the words staccato, spiteful. ‘Shall I go to him and say that my subordinate, Mr Fry, and his team of computer programmers are convinced that the British Heritage Trust intends a coup? That they’re about to send their tanks up Whitehall and lay siege to Number 10? What else. Fry? That you recommend he sends in the Noise Abatement Society to keep the peace? Talk some bloody sense, for Christ’s sake! All we have are six names the machines say might - just might, mind you - be involved; that and a published letter from the imbecile Lord Bremmer; and our suspicions. That’s the sum total of evidence so far!’

‘Our agent,’ Fry replied quickly, ‘was beaten up and drugged today by Colonel Haig. Have you forgotten that? Doesn’t that mean something?’

‘I haven’t forgotten a single thing. Fry. I haven’t forgotten, for example, a very precise instruction given me by the Prime Minister. I will not go to him now and say that he’s about to be done out of a job and that we are to be returned to our pure, pristine, Aryan state. I’m a generous man. Fry, and I try to be understanding but I suggest, once and for all, that you leave this decision to me.’

Kellick spent the taxi ride home justifying his motives. The telephone was ringing as he opened the door to his flat - a white telephone that blended well with the coffee cream decor. It was Fry talking from the Duty Night’s office.