The Partridge Kite (21 page)

She commanded the most extraordinary contracts and got them. She made the most extraordinary demands on people and got them too. Never had an aristocrat’s name and a beautiful face been used to such advantage.

She timed her exit from razzmatazz cleverly and turned her name and her looks to other things. She combined with them a wit and an ability to talk sensibly in public places about public things that delighted her audiences and almost surprised herself. She applied herself to creating a monopoly on radio and television quiz shows, talk-ins, question and answer routines, with the same single-mindedness that she had used in her rise to earlier model fame. It became so that at any one time if Lady Joanna was not on any of the television channels you would be sure to hear her on the radio.

So her expansion into the novel was to be expected. Her autobiography, revealing all and nothing of her career as the aristocratic model who became the model aristocrat, became Book of the Month choice in America and topped the bestseller list there and in Europe for seven consecutive weeks. It added £247,000 to the Forster estate, and almost as much again to the British Exchequer. She discreetly turned down offers for the film option on the grounds that films exposed too much and are seen by too few anyway.

A string of more bestsellers followed, including a glamorised social history of Rome which, as one reviewer put it, ‘. . . plumbed the heights of its decadence!’

Her marriage, for all its pomp and media coverage, was something of a let down, considering all that had gone before. But it was necessary and she put on her brave and most beautiful face for it.

She allowed Sir Arnold Blakeney, Bart., MP for Cornwall South, Privy Councillor, ex-Home Secretary and the second most powerful man in the Conservative Cabinet, to slip the ring of gold on to the third finger of her left hand, and pronounce her his wife.

But since April 1976 when Sir Arnold, fifty-two years old, collapsed in the House of Commons Bar with a cerebral haemorrhage, Lady Joanna had been a widow. Not strictly a widow, that is not legally, since Sir Arnold was still alive. Not strictly alive that is, because since that dreadful flash of light and pain he had been an imbecile, strapped by his ankles to a hospital bed.

Sir Arnold, ambitious, influential and successful, the man who had transferred with much public approval and as much Parliamentary opposition the recommendations of the Curran-Price Commission on Penal Reform into Law. Ironic, it was cruelly written at the time, that Sir Arnold, the vanguard of the nation’s reactionaries who had come so close to breaking the blood vessels of the Foots, Heffers and other such Parliamentary revolutionaries, should finally fall victim to a seizure himself!

Since that spring day in ’76 he had sat in his private bed with its white and stiffly starched sheets, in an exorbitantly expensive sanatorium on the South Downs of Sussex. Handsome, ruddy-faced, silver hair brushed and shining, his own natural thirty-two teeth perfectly white, his ablutions the responsibility of a teenage nursing auxiliary who had no time for the sick. Sir Arnold sat juggling with oranges, sometimes giggling, sometimes mouthing the dreadful words of the Devil as saliva ran down the sides of his mouth on to the collar of his silk pyjama jacket.

No one came to see him, which troubled him far less than it did the nursing sisters who remembered his face and name in better days. No friends came. No family. No wife. No sympathy, except from the sad faces of the nodding nurses who peered through the inspection hatch in the door to watch him tossing oranges into the air and hear him scream in genuine and dreadful despair, as they fell on to the floor around him.

Lady Joanna had little time to remember him now. Sadly, once Sir Arnold had turned imbecile, she could not remember him any other way. In fact, once freed of him, the man she had needed to marry in order to secure the onward bound of the Forster fortunes, she felt she had been reborn.

She found her new life through an old lover. Someone she had known and indulged with frequently since the night of her sixteenth birthday, when she had been taken into the broom cupboard opposite the cellar stairs and introduced to orgasm. Other than the contractual penetrations of Sir Arnold, which she had blocked the moment her first and only pregnancy was confirmed, she had never known anyone else in or out of her bed.

But the freedom to indulge now, more often and more openly, was not what had given her this new enthusiasm. Suddenly, she began to breakfast before seven, would lunch punctually at one and was seldom in bed much before midnight. There was much coming and going at Trewythian House and Dawkins and the staff were distressed by the busy routine and the new agility of their mistress.

She was excited by the things her lover talked incessantly about, the ideals that were suddenly championed, conspiracies that seemed so certain to succeed. She had laughed at herself in the beginning. She had had many such bouts of enthusiasm during the past years. Most had become a bore.

But her lover, by discipline and persuasion, had made Lady Joanna positive and single-minded. Her routine, once changed, remained so. Habits were adapted or dropped to accommodate it, old friendships discarded, the most unlikely new ones formed. Her considerable wealth and influence were used to advance it. She did what her lover advised and the creed became a passionate religion.

Which was how Lady Joanna Forster eventually became CORDON Area Director for Cornwall, South and East.

Which was why, when Tom McCullin shouted the word up the stairs to her that evening, she panicked.

‘Send them up, Dawkins.’

She spoke with a firm voice, not affected but with just the slightest drawl that distinguishes the well-bred from the merely well-educated.

Tom and Fry followed Dawkins up the stairs. Through the doorway facing the stairs they saw Lady Joanna sitting at a nest of tables sipping tea from a china cup.

Tom recognised her immediately. There could not be a more famous face anywhere in the United Kingdom. It must, he thought, be quite embarrassing for her to go shopping. But then she wouldn’t need to. The telephone was probably as near as she ever got to a shopping basket.

He recognised the eyes, deep and brown, black hair, brown sheen, the dark skin, product of the Alpine and Caribbean sun and her Cornish blood. Her face was square and broad but the nose and chin were perfectly balanced. Lady Joanna was a powerfully sexual woman and she used her sexuality whenever it best suited her.

Fry spoke.

‘Lady Joanna, we are Customs and Excise officers investigating the sighting last night of a container three miles south of the Peninsula. As you own so much of the land around here we wondered whether you had heard talk of it, whether anyone of your staff may have seen any suspicious movement anywhere along the coast?’

Lady Joanna leant forward and poured herself another cup of tea but offered none. She made them wait for an answer until milk and sugar had been taken.

‘No,’ she said at last, ‘I’ve heard nothing and I’ve certainly seen nothing. As for my employees and tenants, I suggest you ask them directly. I would expect them to tell the police, which is what surely you would expect me to do rather than wait to be asked by visiting Excise men. And really, you could have telephoned me and saved yourselves the journey and me this inconvenience. Is this the only reason for your visit?’

‘Yes,’ said Fry, ‘our only reason. You see, the tug towing this container made radio contact with someone in this area. Our first checks seem to indicate that the radio is somewhere on your estate. It does look. Lady Joanna, as if you have a smuggler as a guest.’

She began laughing and showed her broad flat teeth. She ran her tongue along the top lip, still smiling.

‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘I feel like du Maurier. What creek is the Frenchman hiding in? Do you suppose Dawkins lights a lantern in his bedroom window? Am I in personal danger? Will I be abducted or, better still, seduced?’

She continued laughing and crossed her arms in mock defence across the beige polo-necked cashmere sweater that tightly covered her breasts.

Tom watched her laugh and looked into her eyes. They were not laughing. They were strictly on the alert.

She said, ‘I do not own all of Cornwall, gentlemen, only a tiny part of it. Maybe your radio is hiding somewhere else around here. Isn’t that possible?’

‘Yes,’ said Fry, ‘quite possible, but we have checked all your closest neighbours and their answer is the same as yours.’

‘I’m sorry to sound flippant,’ she said, ‘but the melodrama appeals to me. What do you think they are smuggling? Cognac or Pakistanis?’

She leant forward again, lifted the teapot, poured, and replaced it on the silver salver. She picked up the sugar tongs.

‘We are not absolutely certain what’s in the container,’ Fry said, ‘but we doubt whether it’s Pakistanis.’

‘More likely’ - Tom spoke for the first time - ‘an antidote for them.’

He marvelled at her self-control: just the slightest hesitation as the tongs clasping their sugar cube journeyed from china bowl to china cup. It dropped with a delicate plop. He watched the muscle movement in her face and the eyes which governed the mock humour of it. He had hit target. The radio was in the house certainly and Lady Joanna herself was using it.

‘What an extraordinary and wicked thing to say, Mr. . .?’

‘McCullin, small “c”, cap “C”.’

‘The spelling is superfluous, Mr McCullin. What intrigues me more is that knowing so much you are unable to find this container.’

‘We didn’t say that,’ said Fry. ‘We said we hadn’t found the land radio.’

‘You mean you have found the container?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Yes, we have found it.’

Again just the slightest flicker in the eyes, but Tom saw it. She had relaxed. She knew they were lying, knew they could not know where it was because since six this morning it had disappeared, enveloped in the fog that now covered the western Channel from Longships to Lyme Regis. Only she knew where it was because she was in regular hourly contact with it. The tension just perceptibly left her.

‘But I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You began this conversation by asking
if. . .
’

‘If you or any of your staff had seen any suspicious movement along the coast. You would not have seen the container or the tug towing it because it hasn’t come closer to land than three miles.’

‘The answer is still no, Mr McCullin. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have many things to do.’

She made no attempt to get up from her chair, and by some unseen signal Dawkins came into the room and stood just inside the door. There was no point in staying longer. Both men realised they had got what they’d come for. And if they were right they would soon have more.

Last night in the Prime Minister’s office they had hoped the Nimrod’s accidental sighting of the snow-covered container would give them a break in the sequence, the first since Sanderson’s defection. Now, as they left Lady Joanna sipping her Earl Grey in the elegant drawing-room of Trewythian House, they knew they were that one vital step ahead.

Lady Joanna watched them in the mirrors as they left and waited for the rattle of three cattle grids to be certain they had cleared the estate. She could not be certain which way they had turned once on the road. Right would take them across Goonhilly Downs to Helston. Left would take them only as far as the Point, the car park, the cliffs and the sea below.

She went to her desk and began a series of short telephone calls, all local. All were gay, all apologetic, all a short inquiry and a quick thank you. Ten calls. Ten negative answers.

She walked to the window, swung round and walked to the door. She had made up her mind what to do. She felt both excited and depressed. She knew she was breaking all the rules, the very strict code enforced by CORDON, but she could not explain why. She walked across the landing to her bedroom and began pulling out warmer clothes from a mahogany chest of drawers. She felt her mind rushing off at tangents, and began cursing herself for her lack of concentration. What to tell Dawkins, what car to take, what shoes to wear. As if it really mattered now. She did not recognise panic because she had never been introduced to it before.

She took the dark blue Volvo Estate from the garage and exactly half an hour after she had seen the Cortina leave she left too. She drove a mile towards Poltesco, turned right at the fork on to a single unmetalled track, and carried on down it for another mile until she could see Kennack Sands below. She stopped, quickly reversed and began driving back the way she had come. No cars passed her, none were parked. Satisfied she had not been followed, she drove back through Poltesco and turned right into Ruan Minor. She parked by a public callbox next to a line of dull grey council houses.

It began snowing again, and she could see the broad flat flakes drift and swirl through the headlamp beams. The light had been smashed inside the kiosk but the headlamps lit up the box and the dial. Very precisely she inserted twelve ten- penny pieces and dialled, mouthing the numbers as she did. A number so familiar to her she could have done it quite easily blindfolded.

‘Don’t scream— I’ve no choice - there is nothing else I can do - two men came to the house an hour ago pretending to be Excise - they know about it - for Christ’s sake stop shouting, I have no Alert number, you are my only contact now—They came asking about the radio - they know I’ve got it -1 know they know - they lied to me - said they’d talked to other people around the Estate - but I checked nearly a dozen and no one else has seen them - they came only to me - only to me - and they lied about sighting it -1 know they can’t have - since six this morning visibility has been nil, snow and fog -1 was on by radio just before they arrived - the routing is going as planned - the sinking will occur exactly on time.’

She stopped talking. She was breathless and she felt dabs of sweat on her forehead and on the soft pouches of skin below her eyes. The telephone mouthpiece was wet and smelt foul. Again she had that same sensation, of not being completely in control, of being on the defence. It was unpleasant.