The Partridge Kite (26 page)

They saw the Grotto immediately. A papier-mâché fairytale castle, painted in brilliant fluorescent colours, glittering with gold and silver tinsel. Dull black towers like witches’ hats stood at each comer. The faces of Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi and others of Disney Land nodded their heads out of cellophane windows. And dozens of little children gazed back at them darkly, suspiciously. Their mothers pecked and cackled at them. This was their long- promised, long-awaited outing to see Father Christmas in London.

Fifty-penny pieces were red-hot in each tight chubby hand as children queued up for their turn to sit on Father Christmas’s knee and be given a present from the barrel in front of him. But as each child moved one place nearer to the man in the red robes and white beard, their faces became stiff with nervousness, and more than one panicked in that final moment as they came within reaching distance.

Tom was first out of the lift and moved straight to the model railway counter. Fry held back to be last out. Encircled by a bevy of mothers and children, he went right, sideways to the Grotto and stood just inside the glass swing doors with the FIRE ESCAPE sign illuminated above. From there he could see the lights, the model railway counter and the counters beyond that.

Fry’s right hand began to sweat around the Browning revolver in his overcoat pocket. He had never fired to kill a man. But he knew that if he had to, he wouldn’t miss.

He looked at the wall clock at the far end of the shop floor. They were punctual. Three minutes to five. Muzak’s heavenly angels began ‘Jingle Bells’. A child began crying somewhere in the queue. A mother slapped, and the cry became a roar.

Fry could see Tom, back to the wall. He looked totally at ease, hands in pockets, looking for all the world like a man consumed by an infantile passion for small gauge.

Fry saw him first, coming down the steps from the baby-wear department. A familiar face, just as Wilde had promised, so familiar that other shoppers as they passed it turned to look back, trying to place it exactly.

Tom looked up from the railway as he came to him. The man smiled, mouthed some pleasantry and held out his hand. Fry watched. Tom did nothing, said nothing, and kept both hands deep in his overcoat pockets.

The man, still smiling, leant against the counter and gestured Tom to come closer. Tom’s back was now turned to Fry but he could see the man’s face quite clearly. Slowly the smile left it as he began talking to Tom in a concentrated way and with the look of bland sincerity that reminded Fry of a door-to-door insurance salesman. But as far as Fry could see, Tom was not answering. His shoulders remained still.

Then it changed. The man brought his face much closer to Tom’s, threatening. Obviously threatening. He held up the fingers of his left hand and began to flick them at Tom one by one, as if he was itemising his argument into neat paragraphs, emphasising each in case Tom should underestimate their separate importance.

Still Tom made no answer, no gestures. Anger began to creep into the man’s face and he seemed to be talking to Tom in short staccato sentences at odd five-second intervals.

He waited for Tom to answer but still Tom said nothing. He was about to turn away when suddenly the man pulled out a blue check handkerchief and began dabbing the back of his neck with it. An odd place to sweat, Fry thought, and there was something so obviously wrong with the gesture that he moved forward instinctively from his hiding-place and into the lights of the Grotto.

There was commotion around Father Christmas. A child, a pretty blonde girl four years old, possibly a little older, was struggling on his knee. The child’s mother, alarmed at Santa’s behaviour, came forward as the girl grabbed the cotton-wool beard. It came away from the face, a wire hook catching and scratching Santa’s left ear. . . a deformed left ear.

Fry saw it and began shouting. He pulled the Browning from his pocket but Menzies fired two shots, one hitting Fry dead centre of his stomach. Fry grasped the shattered belt buckle and reached out for Menzies, but already he was on his feet and Fry careered through the line of children, knocking over the barrel and scattering presents across the floor.

Women and children began screaming. Menzies held the little girl tight in his left arm, holding the gun with his right, and backed into the Grotto.

The man with the familiar face by Tom turned and began running back towards the baby wear department as Tom swung round, gun in hand, towards the Grotto. Then he swung back again, gun arm still outstretched as if to fire at the running man. But it was too late and twenty, thirty or more people were already between the gun and the running target.

A woman panicking smashed the glass fire alarm case with her bare hand and bells began ringing. Blood spurted from the artery in her wrist and she began screaming hysterically, running around in a tight little circle holding her hand high as her own blood covered her head and face and ran into her mouth.

Other shoppers from other departments running for the lifts began sliding about the floor made slippery by the blood and the toys. No one saw Fry crouching, still conscious on the floor, holding himself round the middle as if he had a piece of rotten meat and not a bullet in his intestines.

Tom jumped up on to the model railway lines, crushing rolling stock with his feet, to see the layout of the Grotto. It was a simple corridor ten yards long, crossed at the top with another, like the letter T. Menzies, he knew, would only have gone in if he had already checked the way out. Fire escape doors on both sides, the one on the left going up and the one on the right going down. Never climb to escape, he remembered, and ran to the swing doors right.

As he pushed through them, ten yards ahead he saw Menzies. He was coming out on to the landing holding the child, who was screaming and kicking wildly, still clutching with both hands the Christmas present she’d been given by him only a few minutes before.

Menzies fired three times and the glass doors behind Tom shattered. One of the bullets hit the bleeding woman directly through her left shoulder blade, and she fell dead.

Menzies turned and went back through the landing door. Tom ran forward but was grabbed from behind by the child’s mother pleading in a dreadful hoarse voice that seemed no longer to be alive.

‘Anna,’ she croaked, ‘Anna! My God, he’s got my Anna!’

She beat her fists on Tom’s back. He pulled open the door and pinned the woman behind it against the wall.

He went through and was in the Grotto. He saw the fire escape door at the far end which led to the stairs going up.

Ahead and above him he could hear Menzies’ feet on the uncarpeted concrete stairs, and the screams from the child.

Tom followed, up one flight, past the signboard, ACCOUNTS, CREDIT, SECURITY. Then two shots . . . and a door being kicked open. The sudden blast of cold air and the sound of traffic.

Menzies had climbed as far as he could and was now on the balcony, the long balcony high above Oxford Street, flanked at each end by two enormous reindeer suspended above the busiest shopping street in the world.

Tom stopped. He looked up at the final flight of stairs. Snow was swirling through the open door. He could feel the cold. Reds, blues and yellows of the neon lights outside reflected on the wall opposite.

He counted the stairs up to the landing. Ten. Once he’d turned the comer to climb them he had no protection. Menzies would need only one shot.

He kicked off his shoes, breathed deeply and applied first pressure on the trigger. He went up the stairs two at a time and flung himself against the far wall sideways to the open door. No one fired. He caught his breath, felt his heart thumping and listened. Above the noise of the traffic he could hear the child crying and her screams of ‘Mummy!’

Slowly he went through the doorway. The cries were coming from the left. He edged out on to the balcony, revolver raised level with his eyes, held by both hands at arm’s length.

Menzies in his red robes was at the far end, twenty yards away, back to the parapet, dwarfed by the prancing reindeer, holding the child. The little girl was silent now, too weak or too terrified to struggle any more. She stared wide-eyed at Tom and held her Christmas present tightly in both hands to her chest.

Tom began walking slowly towards Menzies, each man pointing his gun, eye-level, at the other. At this distance Tom could not be certain he wouldn’t hit the child; Menzies could not miss him. Still Menzies didn’t fire. A macabre Father Christmas, red-hooded, with his clipped military moustache and cotton-wool eyebrows. CORDON’S very professional assassin, who had killed men skiing, swimming, in their bath, on an escalator and under a London Transport bus. Wherever, whatever the orders, he had completed them with perfect ease and precision.

Tom continued walking slowly towards him. He caught the smell of roasting chestnuts and heard quite clearly, despite the roar of traffic, a single laugh, a car door slam, a busker’s trumpet. Still Menzies didn’t fire.

He was fifteen yards from Menzies when he stopped. Behind him suddenly there was a shout, the dead-alive cry of the child’s mother. ‘Anna! Anna!’

Hearing it, the child began struggling again, not crying, no sound came from her. But her sudden movement caught Menzies off-balance, and he fell against the parapet, holding the girl tighter and bringing back his right arm to steady himself. The child grabbed the revolver with one hand, and as it was turned by the struggling tiny body the gun exploded into it.

Menzies let go and the child’s body toppled over the parapet’s edge. For a moment it was held by the coloured bunting and silver chains draped along the balcony. Then it broke through them and fell to the street eighty feet below. Tom started to run forward.

Menzies turned his gun to Tom and pulled the trigger. But the magazine was empty. Menzies had killed the child with his last.

Tom could hear the mother behind him, sprawled on the balcony floor sobbing. He remembered a football of gore, could still smell vomit on a blue serge uniform, and the look in Kellick’s dead eyes as they’d stared at the open French windows.

Slowly he raised his revolver level with Menzies’ face and fired. The bullet separated the cotton-wool eyebrows an inch above the nose. The head jerked back, the shoulders turned and the red hood and red robes collapsed on to the floor.

Tom looked down through the reindeer’s legs to Oxford Street. The traffic had stopped and a circle of people now surrounded the tiny figure crumpled in the snow, still clutching the little taffeta fairy Father Christmas had given her.

With his right foot Tom rolled over the red bundle on the floor. He knelt down on one knee and put the muzzle of his gun to the dead man’s chest.

He fired where the heart should have been.

The convoy of white ambulances moved off, carrying the dead and the distressed, blue lights flashing.

Fry in his was taken with police escort to the casualty operating theatre of St Thomas’s, the other side of Westminster Bridge.

From the pavement Tom could see the flashlights of the police photographers on the fourth-floor balcony. Police were everywhere, shepherding, comforting, and moving on the spectator ghouls.

Tom turned east and began walking, pushing his way through the crowds still flocking to the free macabre show.

At the corner of Oxford Circus he suddenly stopped. On his right by the edge of the pavement was a face he recognised. Staring at him from a newspaper stand was Lady Joanna Forster, a six-by-four-inch photograph below the bold headline, LADY J. DEAD.

And as the god Fate would have it, in the bottom left- hand comer, almost as if it had been included as a last- minute stop press item, was the photograph of another woman. A small paragraph underneath said that Elsa Pilkington, the former British Ski Champion, had died in a fire at her Leicester home. Apparently it had taken police doctors nearly two days to confirm the identity of the twisted and charred body.

Tom turned and walked away towards Langham Place, past BBC Broadcasting House. Not much of a requiem for them, he thought, sharing the front page of an evening newspaper. But at least it would have pleased them both to know they had shared something. At the end.

He walked to Euston Station through the snow, partly to unwind, partly to use up time. He was on edge and had been walking for half an hour and turning into Euston Road before he realised he’d been holding the revolver in his hand so tightly that it was warm and wet with sweat.

Killing on your own doorstep. He’d never killed so close to home before. Ulster, yes! Eighteen of them at least. But as far as he’d been concerned they’d been foreigners. Not on an English doorstep. Belfast had always been regarded as a foreign posting.

The station clock showed a quarter to eight. The sleeper to Inverness left at 9.50. He bought himself half a dozen magazines from the newsstand. He would read none of them, he knew, but it was something to do. A woman who looked eighty, with blue hair and a duffle coat, passed him pushing a trolley. Her sandwich tasted like Plasticine and her tea like Rinso and he threw both into the waste-bin at the front of her trolley before she moved on. If she noticed she didn’t show it. Anyway she was eighty pence heavier and it would buy her another brandy and ginger before she did her next circuit.

Two hours and eight double Scotches later, Tom showed his ticket at the barrier and walked steadily down platform nine.

The steward was waiting by sleeper carriage five, a small clean-cut dapper little man with a shiny face and shiny dyed black hair, the sort of man who seems only to work as a British Rail steward.

‘Good evening, Mr McCullin,’ he said.

Tom’s hand quickly went into his right-hand overcoat pocket. The Browning was cold again.

‘How d’you know me?’

‘Don’t be alarmed, sir,’ the steward answered in the most theatrical Scottish accent. He beamed. ‘All my sleepers have arrived except two. A Mr McCullin and a Mrs Lethbury. And I knew you weren’t Mrs Lethbury! Your driver has already delivered your holdall.’

Tom climbed into the carriage following the little man. Christ, he thought. What did I tell you, Kate? No bloody brass band but it’s just as bad.