The Partridge Kite (29 page)

The counter clerk added up the number of words and began what seemed a long involved procedure of multiplying the total by the recent increased inland telegram charges. Tom waited, resisting the temptation to look round quickly. The feeling was back again. He was being watched. The familiar sensation of eyes focusing on the nape of his neck, a watcher close enough to touch.

He thanked the clerk, pocketed his change and turned slowly round, not looking at anything in particular, absent- mindedly almost. But every person in that room registered. A middle-aged woman at the far end of the counter buying insurance stamps; two men beyond her, father and son by their ages and looks, with a trolley full of parcels. Under the clock by the window on the opposite wall, a young woman in a blue headscarf and wearing large fur-covered snow- boots, a child in a baby buggy at her side, was filling in a form from a rack marked VEHICLE ROAD FUND LICENCES. By the door on the other side of a wicker basket on wheels was a postman throwing letters expertly into a wall of pigeon holes.

Tom tied Kate’s scarf more tightly around his neck, tucked the ends into the top of his overcoat and walked out into the snow again. The young woman in the headscarf crumpled the application form into a ball in her hand, threw it into the waste-bin under the table, about-turned the baby buggy, pulled the child’s bonnet over its ears and followed.

Tom didn’t know about Scottish licensing laws. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were not governed by the same absurd logic of English Parliaments that told a man when he should or should not drink. So he was just a little surprised to find the bars already half full at 5.15 in the evening.

He hesitated outside the first he came to but only for an instant. If someone was behind him watching and waiting he reckoned it wouldn’t matter where he went or what he did within reason. They would stay with him.

In one hour and forty minutes he went into seven bars, drank thirteen large malt whiskies, and ate a stale ploughman’s lunch. He would have made it eight bars had he not seen the grey hotel porter already drunk in one.

At a few minutes to seven he had managed to slip and slide his way back the icy path to the hotel. He stepped into the lighted porch and began noisily stamping the snow off his shoes. Then he turned around and did a deep bow to whoever was out there, whoever had been his patient and anonymous companion.

The young woman, still in her headscarf, parked her Mini estate on the verge by the side of the road just out of view of the main gates of the hotel driveway. The child was in a carrycot on the back seat. She reached across to the floor of the passenger seat for a vacuum flask and poured warm milk into the baby’s bottle. The baby began noisily sucking the teat, and the woman looked at her wristwatch. In just over twenty minutes’ time her shift ended and someone else would take over.

She looked through the leafless hedge that separated hotel property from the public verge and saw the light come on in Tom’s room.

Tom didn’t enter the room but switched on the wall light by the door frame and left the door open. He knelt down and pulled back the carpet. There, sharply defined, was the print of a left shoe, a size nine, possibly ten. A print going in. But none coming out.

‘You have been reading too many Alistair MacLeans, Mr McCullin. People don’t actually do that any more.’ The voice came from behind the door.

‘Obviously some people still do,’ Tom said as he stood up.

‘Don’t do anything hasty, Mr McCullin. I can see you quite clearly through the opening in the door. I am armed and I know you are not, so come in slowly and hold your hands out in front of you. Do not turn round.’

Tom put out his hands clasped in front of him, and walked into the room looking like a preacher going up the aisle. It was icy cold. The window was wide open.

‘It’s a little chilly in here,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I close the window and put some money in the meter for the fire?’ He stood facing the window, hands still in front of him.

‘Put the fire on if you like but leave the window open,’ said the voice. It was not a Scottish voice. It sounded middle- aged and definitely upper-class.

‘Isn’t that a bit wasteful?’ Tom asked.

The voice laughed. Pleasantly enough in the circumstances, Tom thought.

‘You’re spending Government money, Mr McCullin, so I shouldn’t worry. Fact is, I need the window open because I’m expecting to hear something.’

‘Do you have a ten-penny piece to spare?’ Tom asked.

The coin spun through the air and landed on the bed less than a foot from him. The meter clicked and the electric bars went through their change of colour routine until they were white-hot again.

‘Are we waiting for something to arrive?’ he asked.

‘We are.’

‘Something or someone?’

‘Both.’

‘Would you like a Scotch?’ Tom asked.

The voice didn’t answer.

‘Okay if I have one?’

‘I’d hoped you’d had enough tonight.’

‘Yes or no, please.’

‘As you like.’

Tom reached forward for the whisky bottle and began pouring some into the pewter flask. Then he began sipping it.

‘Please remember, Mr McCullin, the hip flask is not a missile. I am holding a Colt at first pressure and I am aiming it at your right thigh. I have been instructed not to kill you but to maim, and only if it’s absolutely essential.’

Tom took another sip. Thank you,’ he said.

Nothing more was said for a full three minutes. The heat of the fire was burning into Tom’s left calf, but the rest of his body was slowly freezing up. His hands and his face felt numb and he began to worry about a cold forefinger held for so long at first pressure on the sensitive trigger of a Colt.

‘If I hear it before you,’ Tom said eventually, ‘I’ll let you know.’

The voice didn’t respond.

‘May I know what it is we’re listening for?’ he asked.

Still no answer.

‘May I have a pee?’

‘No need, Mr McCullin. Your gun is no longer behind the bathroom door.’

‘But I still need a pee. There’s a lot of whisky inside wanting to get out and. . .’

He didn’t finish. They both heard it, above the noise of the wind, a
phut-phut
like a distant outboard motor but with a stronger, deeper beat. Tom nodded to the window. So they’d come for him and they’d sent a helicopter.

‘Is that for me?’ he asked.

Tor us.’

‘Can I take my whisky with me?’

‘As you wish.’

He dropped the hip flask into his overcoat pocket. But the butt of the Colt bruised a small bone behind his right ear before he had a chance to see the Huey drop into the field just below his bedroom window, centring itself between the tall firs with only yards to spare in the circle of the rotor blades.

A fox, terrified at the commotion, scampered from his earth, was blown sideways by the blast, recovered, and began leaping away across the snow, leaving his vixen to pull three cubs in her mouth after him.

Friday, 24 December

Tom had not expected to see it in such a place even at Christmas. But it remained a firm image long after his eyes had focused. A wreath of holly and vine covered in snow icing, red berries and red candles hanging from the ceiling. He tried to raise his head but felt sick with the pain.

‘Don’t move, Mr McCullin. You’ve no need to. You were hit overhard, I think, but nothing important’s broken.’

Another voice in another corner but in another room. A warm room smelling of something sweet and familiar. And a voice he thought he knew.

‘You are at last where you’ve wanted to be, Mr McCullin. Inside CORDON. It’s something we hadn’t planned for, and something that must surprise even you.’

Tom didn’t answer but closed his eyes. Keep talking, voice, he thought, keep talking and I’ll get your face and your name.

There was a knock on the door, somewhere on Tom’s left side, and a little behind him. There was movement, and two pairs of hands lifted him bodily into a sitting position. He found he was in a large wing-backed armchair.

On his left was a fire in a large, open, stone fireplace burning peat. That was the smell. Above the fireplace he saw a small circle of intense light and inside it six letters that made up the word CORDON.

Across from the fire there was only shadow, but as his eyes adjusted he saw, fifteen or so feet from him, the outline of another wingback. In it, protected by the shadow, was the silhouette of a man, a large man. In the glow of the fire he could make out a heavy tartan rug wrapped around his legs covering his shoes.

Tom felt the swelling around his ear thumping against the wing of the chair. But he’d forgotten his pain.

‘Who are you?’ he said across to the shadow. ‘I know your voice.’

‘Most likely you do. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for my name.’

‘Tomorrow’s Christmas. Are you Santa Claus?’

The man in the shadow suddenly laughed. He seemed genuinely amused. But the laugh just as quickly became a cough. Tom had heard sounds like it walking at night between diseased sleeping beggars on the pavements of Calcutta.

He watched the chair: a hand moved out of the shadow, tucked the rug tighter around the legs and moved back into the darkness again.

‘On Christmas Day my name will be broadcast to the people of this country and the world. I shall win the hearts and minds of the majority of the British people and by their support I shall stand the test of the world’s consequent hostility.’

His words echoed around the room. The words of that so- familiar voice, promising civil war so reasonably, so inevitably.

‘And there is nothing to be done to stop you?’ Tom asked.

‘No! Nothing.’

‘Do you have the Army with you?’

‘We cannot do it without them.’

‘All three Services? And the Police?’

‘Enough in each. We do not have to vouch for every last man, but our support will be sufficient at the hour.’

‘Kellick was convinced,’ Tom said, ‘that the Services could not be bought. So was Military Intelligence.’

‘Kellick made many mistakes, Mr McCullin. And Military Intelligence was so totally confident of Service loyalty that they were afraid to dig too thoroughly for fear of offending it.’

‘How did you do it. . . infiltrate all three?’

‘We had many willing converts, believe me. We have the finest armed forces in the world but for years now they have been made to look fools by successive governments. From Suez to Anguilla they have humiliated our Military with absurd decisions, leaving us finally to be ridiculed in Ulster.’

He paused for some seconds.

‘There were opportunities enough to exploit. But our deliberate infiltration was modelled on a Soviet plan.’

The coughing began again. Tom watched the hand, strong and large, come out into the fire-light again, reach down between the folds of the rug and pull out what looked like a small silver snuffbox. It withdrew, and Tom could just make out the movement of the hand towards the face. Within seconds the coughing stopped.

‘You’ve probably never heard of the Prague Convention, Mr McCullin?’ His voice was now hoarse and almost a whisper. ‘1956 it was, and squeezed in between a thousand other items on the agenda was Resolution Number 289. It stated simply that Portuguese University graduates with secretly-held Left-Wing sympathies would be directed to join the Portuguese Army as officer cadets.

‘Now that was a long time ago but the Communists’ plan for a revolution in Portugal did take place just as they knew it would. The Flower Revolution, as it was called in April 1974, was born out of that resolution in Prague, a military coup led by Left-Wing officers who were the children of that Convention.

‘The Communists are the world’s masters in long-term strategy, Mr McCullin, and I took a leaf out of their book. For many years now we have been placing our own young Turks into the Services, watching them rise to seniority.’

‘Only in the Services?’

‘No. Just as the Communists in this country have been placing their people throughout Government and industry, so have we. From local constituency level to the Front Bench, from the boardroom to the shop floor. And our advantage is that, unlike our enemy’s, our strength is not known. Our people have not shown themselves. They have been what I think you refer to in your business as “sleepers”.’ ‘Why did you give us their names?’ Tom asked. ‘I’d have thought they were some of your more important sleepers.’ ‘The most important,’ the voice said.

‘Why, then?’

‘You realised almost at the start, didn’t you, that you were part of a plan?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you never knew why?’

‘Once I thought I’d glimpsed something of it, but not enough.’

‘I gave you their names through Sanderson and his confession because they were suspect.’

‘But you’ve said they were important to you.’

‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘so vital in fact that we could not have proceeded without them.’

‘So how could they have been suspect?’

‘We had no choice but to treat them as suspect. They were so vital to the Organisation, we had to be absolutely certain of their loyalty. They were holding up the entire operation, our planning was delayed again and again. My machines were not convinced of their infallibility. So we devised the final test. We gave their identities to SSO. The idea was Sanderson’s.

‘In my mind I saw them as birds and Sanderson the beater sent in to flush them out. You, Mr McCullin, became the Kite, the Partridge Kite. It was something I’d seen used as a lad at shoots. They flew a large kite, five feet high, cut out of canvas in the shape of a hawk. When the partridge were flushed out they would see above them the silhouette of the hawk and fly low. . . within easy range of the guns. It never failed.

‘So we flew you above my suspects, like that kite, to keep them low. . . keep them close to me.

‘Previously, you see, many had failed us at the last moment. In those early days we used more primitive methods to test our people’s faith: different beaters, different guns. But without the Partridge Kite to keep them down, within range, they flew high and wild and we came close on many occasions to disasters because of it.